


The One Where Cait Sith Becomes the AVALANCHE Emotional Support Animal

by lowflyingidiom



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997)
Genre: Cait Sith as Reeve's tiny fursona, Cait Sith as everybody's teddy bear, Canon-Typical Violence, Crack Treated Seriously, Ensemble Cast, Fluff, M/M, Slow Burn, Team Bonding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2021-01-28
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:55:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 38
Words: 97,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26504773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lowflyingidiom/pseuds/lowflyingidiom
Summary: When Reeve was assigned to gather intelligence on the AVALANCHE insurgent group, he never expected to like them so much. And he definitely didn’t expect they would keep trying to scratch his ears
Relationships: Minor or Background Relationship(s), Reeve Tuesti/Barret Wallace
Comments: 294
Kudos: 96





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Some changes have been made to the FFVII Compilation timeline and dialogue, most notably the nature of Reeve's connection to Cait Sith. Additional changes have been made to Reeve's history to better align with his narrative (rather than his meta) role in the game story - if you're a purist be forewarned. While major events (for good or bad) parallel those of the OG, many smaller events are reinterpreted / expanded here. 
> 
> Current rating is for canon-typical violence and the swearing that gets censored in the game itself. Adult content / potentially triggering content in future chapters will be accompanied by full warnings with option to skip. If I miss a warning for anything please reach out to me and I'll fix it ASAP. 
> 
> A million thanks to my beta SandyMoonCat who has been and continues to be patient and supportive of the writing of this fic.

“That’s the friend you’re looking for? He sure looks dangerous” Cait Sith said when Barret first came into view, a crisp mental image like the edge of a dream for Reeve where he sat in his office in Midgar. Before Cloud could answer him, Barret was shouting and opened fire into the weather battered sofa in the ruined house. 

In Midgar, Reeve broke into a sweat. The neural link didn't differentiate the threat level between his dark office and that of the scorching desert below the Gold Saucer. The little robot cat made a yowl of distress and ducked for shelter behind the larger stuffed moogle, hitting Reeve with a wave of sudden vertigo as his equilibrium tried to process movement happening half a world away. 

Of course, he knew Barret was dangerous. He read the file (open on the monitor in front of him, had been since an incident concerning a man with a gun arm was reported four hours earlier), he watched the CCTV footage. He didn’t expect the man to be so imposing in person - if contact with the little robot cat could be called 'in person' - because Barret in the videos had been surreal, like footage from an action movie. 

Barret experienced directly was terrifying: his anger, the way he moved like a string pulled taught and ready to snap at any provocation, hurt and furious at once, savage as a wild thing. If he’d doubted it before, Reeve had no trouble believing now that this was a man capable of the bombing attacks in Midgar.

In spite of his newly appointed duty to keep close watch on the actions of AVALANCHE, he was grateful when he wasn’t included in the party that set off into the desert to search for the man Dyne (a much smaller folder in Reeve’s database). While the risk may have been to the robot cat and not to Reeve himself, he still didn’t know what would happen to him if the cat got damaged, and wasn’t ready to find out at the hands of a gun-happy eco-terrorist. 

\---

It was hours later and well past midnight in Reeve's Shinra building corner office when the small group returned from the desert sunburnt, exhausted, with a much more subdued Barret in tow. In his mind, Reeve followed Cloud and Barret into a meeting with a local heavy trying to get them into the Chocobo races - one of Dio’s stranger whims.

Things seemed quiet until the man, Coates, said something disparaging about Dyne. Reeve cringed back (the cat’s onboard AI dropping behind the moogle again and sending his head spinning) as Barret shouted “The hell do you know?”

Coates squealed, “You’re right, I don’t know anything sorry!” because Barret had hoisted him off the ground with one massive fist balled in the front of the man’s shirt. 

Reeve watched in silent fascination as Cloud calmed the man with a few minor motions that caused Barret to relax and step back, sullen and subdued again as Cloud and Coates began to negotiate the terms of their release from the desert prison. Fast on the heels of that Esther appeared and swept Cloud and Coates out of the trailer, leaving Reeve alone with the hulking leader of AVALANCHE and suddenly no idea what to say. 

He was saved the effort when Barret asked “The hell you looking at cat?”

“It’s Cait,” he squeaked out in the robot’s chipper timber, and slid out from behind the moogle, “It’s a pleasure to make your-" 

Barret cut him off “Look, ’s been a fuck of a day, and whatever the hell you are, I don’t care,” he rubbed at the gun arm with his left hand. Reeve perceived the glint of a medallion wrapped around the hand – it didn’t correspond to anything he remembered seeing in any of the files. They had said it belonged to Dyne? Had Dyne really died out in the desert? 

“Sure, sure,” Reeve nodded, and he had the disconcerting feeling of his head bobbing in the desert and in Midgar simultaneously. Cait Sith's voice didn’t shake. The little robot’s voice hadn’t been programmed to convey that kind of emotion.

The medallion now hanging like a talisman from Barret’s gun arm obviously carried some weight that Reeve had no idea how to deal with, and he figured the most organic thing would be simply not to deal with it, “Well, just let me know how I can help you out from here on! I met your friends up in the Saucer and-"

This time he was cut off when the man’s massive hand grabbed the small robot around the middle and lifted it into the air, glaring furiously. 

Reeve’s curiosity about the neural connection’s sensitivity was answered suddenly and definitively when he felt himself wrapped by a giant’s ghost hand where he sat in his office, tight around his torso from beneath his arms down nearly to his hips. The robot cat’s booted feet kicked futilely in the air. He had a vague impression of the white moogle, an independent AI, bouncing impotently beneath him. 

“I told ya I’m not in the mood,” Barret rumbled from proximity, dark eyes wild, and Reeve was deeply grateful to be a continent away, because the man was, put bluntly, scary as fuck. His fingers clung frantically to his office chair in Midgar and to Barret’s thumb in the desert. 

“Hey!” Reeve shouted at him in the cat’s voice, “hands off the merchandise!” 

Barret stared at him for a too-long moment before placing him roughly back atop the moogle. In Midgar, Reeve felt the pressure around him release. 

“Turning into a real shit show,” the man observed, presumably to himself, as he stormed out of the trailer. 

Reeve and the cat shared an overdue sigh of relief to be temporarily wholly alone, and Reeve stood up on trembling legs to fetch a bottle of water from his office’s small fridge. 

He was grateful when the group’s immediate attention stayed focused on Barret, letting the Cait Sith robot integrate into the team almost unnoticed. He was more grateful when a large red buggy appeared not long after, and the robot was loaded into the back bench by itself.


	2. Chapter 2

The first time Reeve saw Aeris in person was in that bastard Hojo’s lab. 

He’d been in for some final adjustments to his neural link after finding problems with the mini model they’d run at the Honeybee (he still cringed internally with embarrassment to think of it; bad enough to be there on one of the President’s errands, worse to navigate the tiny moogle into the wrong room anyway). 

Following that slip up, he hadn’t been in the best headspace entering the lab. The young woman in the next room, visible through the open doorway, hadn’t immediately attracted his attention as being out of place. It was only after halfway through the interview with Hojo, recounting his experience navigating through the neural link, when he noticed that she was still there watching them with furrowed brows and an unhappy expression. Noticing her frown led him to notice the straps at her wrists, holding her in place through what appeared to be a blood drawing - the small machine at her side whirring back and forth like a metronome, keeping the fluid in motion. 

He’d wanted to ask her then what she was doing there. If she was another “volunteer” in the neural mapping project and what they had decided to use her for – but of course he couldn’t ask. Not just because he was still trying to give Hojo the answers he wanted in order to be done and out of the man’s presence as quickly as possible, but because the project was classified. So classified that a top Shinra executive who was a leading participant in the project didn’t have a damn clue what the scope of the project was. 

It was only in a meeting later that day, when the President revealed that they’d cancelled the rebuilding of Sector 7 to reroute funding into the NeoMidgar Project, that Reeve understood the ramifications of the girl’s presence in the lab. 

He had ached inside, then. 

And he had felt dread when he saw her in the Gold Saucer (did she recognize him? Would she know? Would she somehow grasp the scope of the project she had witnessed in the Shinra Building before escape, and reveal his secret?) but his worry was short lived when she not only failed to identify him as anything besides an advanced AI, but asked him to tell her fortune. 

In his office in Midgar, Reeve swallowed hard and hated himself. 

In the Gold Saucer, he told her that she should expect to go on a long journey. 

\---

They spent hours crossing the desert below the Gold Saucer, and while the sun crept low on the horizon for AVALANCHE, Reeve listened with only the least attention to the goings on in the red buggy. 

He’d already communicated the information regarding Sephiroth and AVALANCHE moving toward Gongaga, and moved to doze on the sofa with a cool bottle of water resting against his forehead in an effort to push back the throbbing headache that was beginning to form there. It was the longest he’d ever kept the link active and there was no end in sight. With the time in Midgar creeping inexorably toward start of business, he wasn’t sure if his headache was from the link or from the lack of solid sleep, his inner awareness assaulted by the glaring desert sun every time he dozed too deeply. He had to trust that the little cat’s onboard AI would keep it swishing its tail, flicking its ears and whiskers in a natural enough fashion not to arouse suspicion while he drifted in and out. 

The buggy reached the north shore of a river crossing just as the sun dipped below the horizon and in the front Cloud eased the machine to a halt in the low scrubland below the desert. 

“It’s too dark to cross safely,” the young man called in the silence left when the engines shut down, “We’d better make camp.” 

The transition pulled Reeve’s attention to the forefront and he remained present as the team unloaded from the buggy, groaning and stretching into the late summer evening. The people were quiet and move to make camp in a way that made clear they’d been going through the process together long enough to fall into a routine, although they didn’t seem at all like the highly efficient insurgent group that Shinra intelligence considered them. The quiet camaraderie was if anything subdued in deference to their leader Barret, after the loss he had suffered that afternoon. 

Reeve supposed the right thing to do would be to make his way over and offer some words of comfort, but he really didn’t know what to say to the man and anyway was still feeling rattled by the rough handling he had received earlier in the day. 

He was saved the trouble of thinking how to approach Barret when the Ancient approached him, instead. 

“Mr Cait Sith?” she asked him, leaning down to the little cat’s eye level and smiling. In his office, Reeve caught his breath at the openness and warmth of her expression, so unlike the last time he’d seen her in Hojo’s dingy medical center. 

“Please just call me Cait!” Reeve set the little cat bouncing and waved cheerily at the girl, “How do you do, Miss Aeris?”

She laughed, and even half a world away it was infectious, and Reeve found himself smiling along with her. 

“Very well thank you. And you’ll have to just call me Aeris then,” she answered, “Cloud tells me that you’re a very advanced android, is that true?” 

“The cutting edge of artificial intelligence technology!” Reeve agreed, grateful that he was, in fact, being completely honest with her. Cait Sith demonstrated by executing a perfectly balance backflip, landing gracefully atop the bouncing Moogle (Reeve had to close his eyes and fought a wave of motion sickness as the world turned over inside his head). 

“You’re very cute,” she praised him, “You remind me of the teddy bear I had when I was a little girl.” 

Reeve cramped with guilt – of course the Cait Sith robot looked like her teddy bear. The little cat had been designed by committee to look like everybody’s teddy bear: sweet, disarming, nostalgic, and trustworthy. 

“I’m just me,” the Cait Sith announced, keeping his perch solidly atop the rocking moogle this time as Reeve tried to keep his stomach settled. 

“Are you like a real cat?” Aeris wondered, tilting her head to inspect him from one side and then the other, “Do you like to be petted, and drink milk?”

Reeve smiled, couldn’t help himself, “Oh, I assure you, Miss, that androids are terribly lactose intolerant… but you will see that my fur is as soft as can be!” 

That too had been a strategic decision, to make the little robot as endearing as possible. It was a decision that Reeve found himself immediately regretting as the young woman tickled Cait Sith under the chin and he felt that, also, in Midgar. Regardless, he activated the purring audio that had been programmed in to make the cat appear as authentic as possible. The little cat stretched out its neck to be petted while Reeve scratched at the feeling of phantom fingers under his beard. 

“Your fur is so soft,” Aeris crooned at him, “is it alright if I pick you up?”

And Reeve couldn’t think of a single reason why Cait Sith should say no – even if he could think of a hundred great reasons why Reeve should – so he nodded his assent and felt himself scooped up by giant arms and spun playfully like a tiny dance partner.

“Ooooh, you’re making me dizzy!” Reeve heard himself say in the cat’s chipper voice, playful tone totally unrelated to the nauseous man in Midgar. Aeris laughed, happy and genuine, and set the robot back on top of the moogle. The onboard AI set it to hop and twirl again with perfect poise and balance, dauntlessly popping onto its feet like an inflatable punching bag. 

When Aeris patted him on the head and straightened his crown, the link interpreted her touch as soft fingers in his hair - an untested interaction of the cat’s sensors with Reeve’s neurological implant. It sent a chill down his spine that he hoped wildly the robot didn’t mirror.

“I’m sorry we’re meeting on such a sad day, Cait. I think it will be very nice having you here,” Aeris said by way of farewell as she went to finish setting up her tent with Tifa, the women starting a conversation in low voices.

In his office, Reeve pulled the waste-paper bin toward himself and vomited, trying to convince himself it was just from the mental strain and the motion sickness. 

As the team finished up their preparations for the night, Cait Sith explained that androids don’t need to sleep and offered to take the first watch (another thing he could say that was technically true, since Reeve could keep all the motion and noise detectors on alert while his link to the little cat was put into sleep mode). While they clearly didn’t trust him enough to leave him alone on watch yet, the young SOLDIER motioned to the rest of the team to get some rest and took up the watch beside Cait Sith, thankfully as happy as Reeve himself to avoid further conversation. 

Reeve set the neural link to alert him if anything happened around the robot, laid down on his lumpy office sofa, and fell quickly asleep.


	3. Chapter 3

They were on the third day out from the Gold Saucer without incident when the buggy lurched suddenly and alarmingly to one side, systems blaring and then shutting down. 

“Shit!” Barret’s voice boomed over the exclamations of the others in the sudden silence of the machine, and was punctuated by another impact rocking the transport before the heavy machine landed heavily back on its wheels. 

The little Cait Sith robot was thrown free of the moogle and Reeve, who was using the extended buggy ride to sleep in his office, woke up so violently that he twisted off the sofa. He landed hard with his shoulder against the hardwood. 

Reeve and the robot cried out together in surprise, and as the members of AVALANCHE began to jump free of the transport he sent the cat and moogle after them. The two robots scrambled together as they landed on the grass beside the rocking buggy, cat finding footholds against the moogle’s cartoonishly small but solid wings. 

To their good fortune, the culprit was attacking on the side opposite the doors – a furious Grand Horn that swiped at their buggy with paws the size of dinner plates and left deep gouges in the red metal. 

Reeve had been getting better at controlling the cat after three consecutive days of active link, some regular motions becoming _almost_ intuitive and the nauseating lurch of spatial dissonance down to a background annoyance. So when he saw Cloud charging forward with his massive Buster Sword held high and felt the robot’s fur prickled with the electricity as Aeris activated a Bolt spell (the hair stood up on Reeve’s arms), Cait Sith joined in the attack. Clinging to the moogle’s white fur at three points while shouting commands into the megaphone tied to the moogle’s voice recognition software, he launched himself at the monster. 

His bold attack didn’t last long as the beast turned on him. Possibly picking up on the radio signals put out but his avatar, possibly just confusing the biggest form with the biggest threat, the Grand Horn swiped its giant claw into Cait Sith’s approach. 

The moogle continued its forward charge and knocked the Grand Horn off its feet, but not before the monstrous claws found traction in the cat sitting atop it, goring through the robot’s midsection before sending it flying head over feet to fall in a heap some dozen feet from the fight. 

Reeve and the cat screamed together. The feeling of being tossed through the air barely registered behind the feeling of being ripped apart at the middle. Reeve clawed his shirt open to see the damage, heart hammering as he searched for the expected injury on his stomach. 

He found only an expanse of unbroken pale skin, muscles jumping and clenching in response to the phantom pain, and he rubbed his hand over the undamaged spot low on his side in relief and disbelief, the intensity of the pain already fading like a distant dream. 

“What the _hell_ ,” he swore, grateful to be alone in his office in the pre-dawn gloom of Midgar. He continued rubbing over the unbroken skin, wondering if that bastard Hojo knew that this was a possibility and neglected to tell him. His head throbbed, and he wondered what had happened to the cat. 

He realized the link was still open, although he had reflexively distanced himself from it in his moment of fear and panic, and he could still see through the eyes of his other self laying broken under the afternoon sun. Aeris and Yuffie were crowded over him, faces pinched with worry as he didn’t respond to their questions or to the cure spells they cast on the cat’s twisted body. 

The pain in his side flared as Reeve slipped back into the robot’s awareness, but without the sudden intensity he had experienced at the time of the injury. He blinked at the girls, “Well now ladies, I don’t suppose one of you would give me a hand to my ride?”

“Cait you’re _bleeding_ ,” Yuffie told him as if he’d missed the obvious, and when he looked down sure enough her hand was pressed against a hole that tore through half through the cat’s right flank, the same painful spot newly accompanied by the pressure she placed there. Coolant leaked between her fingers and dripped into the low grasses, her small hand felt huge against Reeve’s torso in Midgar. Some feet away the large moogle, with no further instructions after the cat had been thrown clear, had remained sitting insensate on top of the Grand Horn. The monster itself was reduced to a bloodied corpse, where Cloud had finished it easily after it was pinned. 

“Cloud!” Aeris shouted to gain his attention. The young man was still wiping gore from his blade as Aeris cast another futile cure spell on the robot, and seemed to notice their distress all at once. He joined them and crouched in front of the cat. 

“How can we help you?” he asked, bright blue eyes scanning the cat’s form with uncanny alertness. 

Reeve didn’t know, and how _stupid_ that in all the surgeries, all the training sessions, all the goddamn _meetings_ , he had never thought to ask what happened if the cat got damaged. He and the robot shared a helpless shrug, shaking their heads. 

Cloud growled and tossed his sword aside, not flinching when it slid violently across a boulder, throwing sparks. He brought up his arm where a materia-laden bangle sparkled and in a moment blue light filled the area.

“Oh!” Aeris pointed to the white moogle, the first to notice the cure-all spell Cloud had cast enveloping the other robot too, then murmuring “Oh, of _course_.” 

Reeve breathed a sigh of relief in his office, glad not to find out what would happen if his robot avatar went fully offline. It was short lived however when he noticed that the blue glow wasn’t only in his mind’s eye, but also casting its glow around his dark office. The magic was cool and tingling not just through the neural link but actively on the unmarred skin of his side. 

Reeve was not a scientist, was a civil engineer and urban planner. But he was educated and not a stupid man, and he knew that materia was not supposed to work that way. There was no documented case of magic materia working over ranges greater than a kilometer even in all the testing that had happened during the war. And it definitely wasn’t known to affect targets that weren’t included in the scope of the spell.

“What the hell did you do to me?” he asked the empty walls of his office. 

On the plains north of Gongaga he offered Cloud a bubbly, cat-robot, “Thank you!” as he sprung to his feet, whole again. 

Cloud nodded an acknowledgement as the little robot scampered to find his megaphone and crown in the surrounding bushes, while Aeris asked, “Cloud, how did you _know_?”

“Didn’t,” the man shrugged, and with a few silent waves of his arms the drama of Cait Sith’s injury was over, the team seeming to breathe a collective sigh of relief and get back into the motion of cleaning up and checking their gear and transport. 

As the cat balanced his little crown at what he hoped was a jaunty angle, he looked seriously at Cloud, and then at Barret, and then back again. All of Shinra’s intelligence had Barret marked as the leader of AVALANCHE, but the group around him seemed far more in tune with the actions and decisions of the young SOLDIER. Interesting. _That_ would be worth mentioning in his briefing with Heidegger. 

In the new calm, he noticed Tifa go over to inspect the damage to the buggy and begin poking in the deep gouges left by the monster. He bounded to where Cloud was retrieving his Buster Sword, checking the blade for damage and resuming the process of cleaning it. 

“That girl, Tifa,” Cait asked, “she’s good with machines?”

Cloud nodded, his eyes falling on the young woman beside their transport, “Tifa knows her way around an engine. Her father was the town mechanic, before…”

“Before what?” Cait Sith asked although Reeve already knew, AVALANCHE files already half memorized. Before the disaster in Nibleheim that Shinra had paid to cover up. 

“Nothing,” Cloud answered. He replaced the large sword in its harness and scooped up the cat without warning. Reeve’s perception spun as he was hoisted beneath his arm half a world away, and deposited atop the large moogle. Cloud finished the motion by ruffling the fur on the cat’s head, dislodging the little crown and forcing Reeve to make a grab for it before it toppled and was lost. 

He was preparing to voice a protest but Cloud had already moved on, toeing at the corpse of the Grand Horn before turning his attention to the presumably _former_ leader of AVALANCHE, “Heh, Barret. That monster had _almost_ as much muscle as you do.” 

The large man growled in answer, appearing to be offended, but straightened and flexed his shoulders anyway. 

It wasn’t nothing, the way Cloud managed the team without even seeming to try. His features were painfully young (twenty-one according to the file Reeve had on him) but seemed to have some measure of calm that made the others want to slow down and listen. He would have done really well in SOLDIER, Reeve supposed, if nothing had happened to send him to AVALANCHE. 

Beside the buggy, Yuffie had joined Tifa to peer into the machine’s open chassis, and Tifa was pointing things out to the younger girl and giving short explanations while the little ninja nodded along and began making some small repairs under Tifa’s supervison. 

Reeve hopped the moogle off the crushed Grand Horn and settled in to watch, the robot curling into a contented cat loaf in the sunshine. 

Later in the Shinra building, Reeve put his reports in order and went to check his appearance in his office bathroom mirror before his evening briefing with Heidegger. While splashing some water on his face, he noticed that the small cut on his neck where he’d nicked himself shaving the day before had evaporated. So too, for that matter, the pain where he’d fallen on his shoulder and the headache that had plagued him from the moment the neural link had turned on days before. 

“It’s not possible,” he told his reflection, turning his chin one way and the other in case he had forgotten the exact location of the cut. He cursed when he couldn’t find it. This, he would definitely need to report to Hojo.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some dialogue and events in this chapter taken directly from the game. Warning for a lot of swearing in this one, Barret's got a foul mouth when he's angry.

After the incident with the Grand Horn, Reeve sent an e-mail to Hojo regarding the effect of the cure-all spell. It bounced back five minutes later with an auto-response that Hojo was out of the office on business and would be available later in the week. Reeve had felt uneasy, but had carried on with his day. 

By the end of a day filled with meetings and budget reviews Reeve had almost forgotten the email, and was more than ready to grab a beer in the bar on the second floor when Cloud eased the buggy to a halt on the outskirts of Gongaga. With a low curse, he turned back from the elevators and headed for his office instead. 

It was late morning in Gongaga, sun brilliantly bright in a way that Midgar simply wasn’t even on a clear day, and the team was already piling out into the warm humid air when Reeve let his mind’s eye drift to fully inhabit his robotic avatar. 

“Uhh, I’m gonna stay and watch the buggy,” Yuffie announced, less spring in her step than was her norm. The terrain had been rugged – in many cases the local rainforest reclaimed the land and they’d been forced to double back as logging trails closed off to nothing. The poor kid looked positively green. 

Although tempted to stay with her and let the Cait Sith robot keep watch while he himself carried on with his evening’s plans, duty dictated that he find out first hand whatever the main group could discover about Sephiroth in the village. The decision was made definitively for him when Red XIII chimed in that he would stay with her as backup in the event that there was a monster attack. 

“Alright,” Cloud nodded to the Cosmo Beast, “Everyone else, let’s see what we can learn in town.” 

What they learned in town was that the Turks arrived before them. 

Reeve’s stomach dropped and he cursed at the walls of his office - Shinra had wanted him planted in AVALANCHE to collect information, and here were the goddamn Turks sent to the same place as if he didn’t already have things covered. 

Cloud held up a hand to slow the group when he saw that they hadn’t been noticed, and their caution was rewarded with an earful of locker room talk (he saw Aeris and Tifa exchanging disgusted looks and shaking their heads at each other, and if he hadn’t been so concerned about having his cover blown he would have laughed out loud). It was almost a relief when Elena discovered them and the two groups got into a scuffle regarding Sector 7. 

Reeve kept the little cat back from the action. He was hesitant, after his previous injury, of getting too near to the violent men. He’d always been wary of the Turks - their privileged access to information and power as Heidegger’s favored henchmen let them get a little too far into unsavory activities even in their down time, and in Reeve’s experience the characters who ended up in the job were typically rough and unpleasant. Their hearts clearly weren’t in the fight though, as the battle that followed would barely have qualified as a bar room altercation, people feeling each other out without intention of doing real harm. 

“How did they know that we were here?” Reeve asked as the Turks made their retreat and Cloud was dusting himself off from the encounter. _You smelt it you dealt it!_ chimed from some childhood memory, and Reeve reflexively made the little cat’s eyes large and pulled its ears down and out trying to look innocent (his human ears itched in sympathy). Of course, he knew exactly what the Turks were doing, but he’d have to take it up personally with Heidegger later. 

“They followed us…” Cloud mused, sliding his sword back into the sling on his back, “But there weren’t any signs of it. Then, that means…”

Barret answered him, “A spy maybe? No, no way.”

“I don’t even want to think about there being a spy… “ Cloud agreed, “I trust everyone.”

And if he looked too long at Cait Sith when he said it, it was probably Reeve’s imagination. He hoped. 

As AVALANCHE continued toward the town, Reeve pulled up the files he had available on Gongaga – largely redacted. He sighed in frustration and rubbed at his temples, the headache a persistent ache again following the few hours reprieve granted by Cloud’s Cure-all spell. It was damn weird that a Shinra department head didn’t have full clearance for company files. It was possible, he supposed, that he could get the full versions if he put in a request form with the archive management team, that it was just a case of no one thinking ahead that he might need them, bureaucracy being what it was. But still damn weird that he was supposed to be running an intelligence operation and his team wasn’t providing him with intelligence. 

What information he did have about Gongaga – looked over briefly on AVALANCHE’s trip south in between preparing for NeoMidgar development and budget meetings – effectively told him what he already knew. It had been founded largely as an outpost for primary resource extraction (logging, a few mines producing rare earth metals) before Shinra had moved in with plans for mako extraction and purchased the mining operations. It had flourished for a time, until a reactor explosion three years before had severely damaged the growing city and surrounding area. Most people had evacuated and permanently relocated following the incident, with only a few thousand refusing to leave, unmoved by the threat of lingering radiation or the poor economic prospects. Reeve was familiar with the project – he had done extensive work on the relief program at the time. 

Under the hot Gongaga sun, their group was approaching a graveyard. Reeve’s stomach sank to see exactly how many of the tombstones looked recent, and he let the cat and moogle fall to the back of their group, the cartoonish good humour of the robots having no place there. 

At the front of the party, Cloud had crouched beside a mourner at a recent grave and was speaking in a low voice with the woman. 

“This is… This _is_ Gongaga isn’t it?” Aeris asked the rest of them, and when a few of his companions shrugged, Reeve nodded the little cat’s head.

“It is. It aligns with my GPS information,” he was only partially lying – the robot’s GPS did let him triangulate from satellite data. 

“I thought so,” Aeris said, raising her hand to her mouth in an unconscious nervous gesture, “Only… I had a friend from here. It’s nothing like he described it.” 

“I think there was an accident,” Barret answered, voice softer than what Reeve had come to expect, “Heard about it from some travelers back when I first joined up with AVALANCHE. A Shinra reactor.”

“Oh,” Aeris acknowledged, looking worried, and Tifa went to put a hand on her shoulder after shooting Barret a look. 

“We passed it on our way here,” Cait Sith offered, then lied, “I felt the energy spike from a side trail where we saw the Turks.” 

Tifa bit her lower lip and glanced at Cloud, who was still in conversation with the woman in the graveyard. 

“Aeris and I will stay with Cloud,” she decided, “Why don’t you guys go take a look at the Reactor and see if you can learn anything?” 

Reeve cringed. He looked over at Barret and saw the man nod an acknowledgement to Tifa before turning to him, “Let’s go.” 

“Sure thing, big man!” the cat chirped with confidence Reeve didn’t feel, still remembering the rough handling he’d received the last time he’d been alone with Barret – although the man hadn’t been lying about having a bad day at the time.

He sent the moogle in long hops to match Barret’s stride, only slightly dizzy now that he’d becoming accustomed to the movement of the robots. The man was surprisingly fast and light on his feet for his size, and Reeve found himself wondering if he would have been able to keep up so easily if he had been there in person – although it was a ridiculous thought that he banished quickly. 

As the voices of the others vanished behind them, he used the cat’s bubbly voice to ask, “You heard about the Gongaga accident when you joined AVALANCHE? When was that?” 

Barret’s dark eyes slid over to him then away, “When I first arrived in Midgar with Marlene. After,” he cleared his throat and touched at his right arm above the gun grafting in a way that he might not have been aware of, although at the low vantage from the cat’s point of view it spoke volumes, “uh, after I recovered from the surgery. I guess not long after the reactor here blew. Shit. The reactor.” 

Barret growled and the machine gun grafted to his arm spun in a series of mad dry clicks, apparently of its own volition, but he didn’t fire. It took an effort of will for Reeve not to let his small avatar shrink back, remembering the feeling of Barret hoisting the little cat into the air in his fit of pique the week prior. Reeve the man rubbed his temples and sighed. 

“Why do you think people still live here when Shinra sent so much aid to support relocation?” he had the little cat ask instead. 

“Shinra aid?” Barret did stop and look at him at that, “what kinda bullshit is that? Shinra don’t send nothin’ when they don’t get nothin’ out of it.” 

Reeve frowned, amazed that people really thought that. He’d been involved in the relief budgeting and logistics himself, although he’d never made it onsite at the time. He nearly argued, but caught himself.

Instead he hurried the robots ahead, hoping to finish up whatever it was they were supposed to be looking for (what _did_ Tifa expect them to find, he wondered, if Barret’s training was as a miner and Reeve certainly wasn’t about to volunteer any privileged Shinra information?) and rejoin the main group. 

He did find himself wondering though, as he looked over the wreckage of the old growth forest that had stood here before the explosion – where did all the aid go if not to relocating and rebuilding? The radiation levels the robots were picking up didn’t suggest the cleanup efforts had been particularly thorough either. Had they hired the wrong subcontractor? Had it disappeared into the pockets of local government? Why hadn’t it been brought to Shinra’s attention?

Trees laid where they had fallen, new growth just starting to cover the evidence of the explosion and subsequent fires. Frames of houses stood wrecked and abandoned. It was nothing like what he’d seen in the Shinra press releases. 

“God damn,” Barret cursed, and a few steps later the reactor was visible to the Cait Sith robot also, a hulking wreck standing alone in the center of a blast zone. 

“No,” Reeve and the cat said together. He’d seen the footage of the cleanup, and it wasn’t anything like this, he didn’t have to pretend when he asked, “how could this happen?”

“God damn fuckin’ Shinra,” Barret elaborated, and his voice rose in volume, the old shapes of a Corel accent growing heavier in his agitation, “That’s how this fuckin' happens. Takin’ from the planet without ever thinkin' who it is that’s gonna pay the real price, selfish corporate garbage.” 

The words barely stung through his surprise, “But there was a cleanup effort.” 

“Propaganda,” Barret looked at him, and waved his gun arms toward the wreckage, “this is what Shinra’s brand of help looks like. All these people outta their homes, outta their jobs, hell, outta their lives.”

The big man sighed and started walking, “’S why we gotta keep fighting them, cat. It’s not gonna stop until they stop bleeding the planet for profit.” 

Cait Sith hopped after him, “But when you blew up the reactors in Midgar... the same thing happened there didn’t it?” 

Barret stopped and looked at him again, this time suspicious, “How d’ya know about that?” 

Reeve froze a moment then blurted, “Tifa told me!” 

“Yeah?” Barret asked, “She tell you that we blew the reactors on the night shift? Barely anyone there. Nothing like this. And then Shinra went and dropped the plate on Sector 7. Bang. That’s Shinra’s justice.” 

Reeve prickled at that, having fought tooth and claw against dropping the plate, “So it’s okay for you to act as a vigilante just because you think someone else is worse? Doesn’t it matter – the people who get hurt because of you?”

“What? It’s because of fucking Shinra that people are getting hurt – look at this shit!” 

Before Reeve could answer the big man had taken off running toward the reactor, cutting off any chance of conversation, and Cait Sith had to bound to catch up with him. When he did, the moogle’s sensors were flashing warnings about elevated radiation levels. 

Reeve briefly considered saying nothing – Barret Wallace was high on the list of people Shinra most wanted to get under control – but the impulse was fleeting. The man might have killed dozens of people directly, tens of thousands indirectly, but Reeve didn’t have the stomach to do harm, even by omission. 

“We’ve got about twenty minutes before the residual radiation risks doing permanent damage, we’d better be fast.” 

Barret nodded in reply, “Dunno what we’re supposed to find here anyway. Maybe evidence of tampering, but after three years the place must be pretty well picked over.” 

Before Reeve could think of anything snappy for the little robot to reply, his sensors picked up motion approaching fast. 

“We’ve got company – possibly a helicopter.”

Barret swore, then began shoving the pair of robots into the space between two pieces of the collapsed structure. Reeve started to protest the rough treatment, but Barret hushed him.

“You’re a sore thumb, get down.” 

When Cait Sith didn’t move fast enough for Barret’s liking he reached with his hand to press the little cat flat against the top of the moogle, then seemed to think the better of it and pulled him clean from his perch, holding him low to the ground. The cat was barely able to look out from behind their cover. 

Reeve breathed heavily at the feeling of being first pressed flat by a giant hand, then held suspended and stationary by the same. The action lacked the threat of violence that had been present the previous time Barret had manhandled his little avatar, but the feeling of being simultaneously sitting in his office and being held full around the middle in Barret’s enormous fist was one that he didn’t care to get used to. He squirmed, in Midgar and in Gongaga. 

“Quiet,” Barret hissed close in his ear, just as the roar of the helicopter hit its peak and suddenly cut out. 

They sat in aching silence as Tseng and Scarlet approached.

“Damn they’re right there,” Reeve could feel the tension in Barret’s body vibrating through the robot, and the odd sensation of having something whispered directly into his ear from half a planet away, “We could just take them out now.”

Reeve blanched, tried to think fast, “It’s too dangerous!” he whispered back urgently, “We don’t know how much backup they have!”

Barret growled lowly and Reeve tried again, “We came to find information, right?”

The hand around him tightened for a moment, then relaxed. Reeve tried to concentrate on what Scarlet was saying past his nervousness and the feeling of Barret’s breath at the side of his face. The distractions didn’t stop the lurch in his stomach when she revealed that Hojo had gone missing. 

Tseng poked around in the ruins of the reactor for a few moments while Scarlet carried on at him about Huge Materia, and after a time appeared to give up. For a brief and horrible moment Tseng turned fully to face them in their alcove – causing the two crouched there to freeze in a horrible moment of being discovered – before telling Scarlet that they were wasting their time and moving on. 

The sound of their voices faded back toward the direction they’d came, followed by the blast of the starting helicopter. 

“Man, I thought they saw us for a second,” Barret breathed in relief. 

“Haven’t I told you I’m good luck?” Reeve answered. He was quite, quite sure that Tseng had in fact seen them, and that it was only the presence of the Cait Sith robots that had prevented a further incident. He suspected he should say something appropriately like a pre-recorded fortune telling, but he was too busy thinking about what it meant that Hojo had disappeared, and that no one had bothered to tell him. 

What if something went wrong with the neural link, and Reeve was left to deal with that like some child’s forgotten science fair project? 

He began to feel sick in a way that had nothing to do with the way Barret swung him through the air and dropped him onto the back of the stuffed moogle.

“C’mon,” Barret prompted him, "we’d better go meet the others. This Huge Materia sounds like trouble.”


	5. Chapter 5

Reeve spent the walk back to meet the rest of the group pensive, waiting for the moment he could disconnect from the cat and find out what was behind Hojo’s sudden absence. Upon getting back to the buggy it was clear that Yuffie and Red XIII had also experienced a trying morning, two angry frogs waving and emoting from the top of the buggy where the ninja and Cosmo Beast should have been. 

The frog transformations had always been something of an anomaly for Shinra science. It seemed to have a limited geographic distribution (unreproducible in Midgar) and there was a theory being floated around that it was a residual effect of mako-based weapons that were tested in the area at the beginning of the war. Reeve was both fascinated to see it in person, and deeply concerned about what would happen if his robot avatars became the target of a spell. 

With amusement, Cloud sprayed the frogs with a solution of maiden’s kiss they found in town, and everyone stepped back as they slowly became Yuffie and Red XIII again. 

“Uhg, I still feel small and slimy,” Yuffie complained, rubbing her arms and cringing, and Barret snorted.

“How can we tell the difference then, princess?” 

Tifa shot him a _look_ and went to put her arms around the girl, but Reeve saw Barret and Cloud glance at one another meaningfully, and realized that he might not be suspect number one on the list of potential spies. 

_Princess_ – Reeve had been labouring under the assumption that only he had recognized and know the young Wutaiian’s history, but supposed that had been foolish. Her face was in the news from time to time after all, usually in an international piece about Wutai’s political rebuilding. As a veteran of the war, Barret at least must keep a closer eye on the outcomes there – and a lingering suspicion about Wutaiian nationals out in the world behaving oddly. 

Like the spotting of Hojo in Costa Del Sol (as Barret had shared with him on the walk back to meet with the others), it would seem to be one of the things that no one was talking about unprompted. When he had asked more about Hojo, however, Barret had simply crowed about the number of Shinra projects that would be falling apart without their top mad scientist. 

Reeve had agreed, and kept to himself the fear that he himself might be one of those projects. It was one of too many concerns that threatened to get him off task from his role infiltrating the small terrorist cell. 

“Okay Red?” Cait Sith asked the Cosmo Beast, who had been shaking himself repeatedly. 

“It’s a strange thing, being in someone else’s skin,” the creature replied, and for a short moment Reeve felt exposed all over again – _you don’t know the half of it_. 

“We brought lots of extra remedies,” Aeris cut in, saving him the need of answering. She gave her bag a little bounce and caused a clinking of bottles, “It shouldn’t be a problem again.” 

She patted Red XIII on the nose and began to detangle his mane with her nimble fingers, and if Reeve didn’t know better he’d say the creature looked pleased in spite of himself. 

*

It was early morning in Midgar when Reeve volunteered Cait Sith to take first watch at the AVALANCHE campsite. After piling back into the buggy at Gongaga the group had settled in for an eight hour haul west in pursuit of Sephiroth, and Reeve had been able to leave the AI controlling the robots while he dozed off on his office sofa. He had meant to get up and head home after a quick nap, but when he woke with a fuzzy head and a sore back it was already nearly 0700h and he had instead dashed down to use the showers at the company gym. Nevertheless, he was feeling better rested than he had since the entire ordeal started. 

He was just pulling in behind his desk with a steaming cup of coffee as the majority of the AVALANCHE group were crawling into their tents for the night. It left him alone at the fireside with Yuffie, who had taken first watch along with him after claiming to be too motion sick to sleep properly. 

He still wasn’t not sure what to make of Yuffie. He had recognized her right away as the delinquent daughter of a prominent world leader (even without the files that were immediately dropped in his inbox when he reported her presence in the AVALANCHE insurgent group) but it had astonished when no one else seemed to be acknowledging it. In spite of Barret’s insinuation the evening before, he couldn’t tell if her notoriety had simply escaped the remainder of the group (being a late addition himself) or if her status was simply unremarkable in a group of similarly remarkable people. 

The interactions he’d had with her in his tenure with AVALANCHE had been friendly, if cool. The young woman was guarded and slightly defensive but pleasant in spite of that. That her curiosity in him was almost as intense as his in her hadn’t escaped his notice either, and he wondered, from time to time, if they weren’t there with similar agendas. 

“So you were made eight months ago?” Yuffie asked him after the small noises of the others settling in was replaced by the crackle of the fire and occasional soft snoring from one of the tents. 

“That’s right!” the little cat agreed in his sing-song voice, and he hopped down from his perch on the moogle to sit beside her in front of their small campfire, “Best AI that Gold Saucer money can buy! State of the art!”

It was mostly true. 

“You don’t seem like a kid” Yuffie observed, reaching over and scratching his neck absent mindedly. 

In his office Reeve choked on a mouthful of hot coffee and his eyes watered. In spite of knowing that the neural link would map the physical touch onto him remotely, he wasn’t prepared for the girl’s fingers tickling under his beard and around his ears. 

And damnit, she wasn’t wrong – but hadn’t been expecting that kind of observation from the young woman. He supposed he should have expected it though, that someone experiencing the wonder of being out in the world for the first time would recognize its absence in a contemporary. 

Reeve pressed his hands over the nape of his neck as the touch moved that way and wished that the neural link was a little less sensitive, or that the robot designers had made his little avatar marginally less adorable. It was really hard to think up a believable answer with the sensation of her manicured fingers tracing patterns over his neck and down to his shoulders, making him feel like the world’s creepiest uncle. 

“I am the way I was programmed!” He answered for want of a better response, and Cait Sith’s cheerful synthetic voice thankfully didn’t reflect the strain that Reeve was feeling. 

“Really?” Yuffie asked, watching the fire, “I thought you were programmed to work at the Gold Saucer.” 

Reeve cringed, “Too smart for my own good, I guess.” 

“Hmm,” Yuffie mused, turning her dark eyes to the little cat, “you haven’t told me my fortune since the desert, either.” 

Reeve cursed internally, “You only needed to ask, miss!”

He sent the robot scurrying back up to the top of the moogle, relieved for an excuse to get away from petting and clearing his head. He rapped on the moogle’s forehead for the sake of showmanship with an unnecessary cry of “Hey, wake up, you!” and began to bounce on the larger robot’s back as it sprung to life. 

The cat cleared its throat theatrically and waved his arms in what he hoped was a dramatic fashion, “A gathering of friends will bring what you desire!” he announced, “Your lucky number is 9!”

Yuffie snorted and rolled her eyes, “Yeah, whatever dude.”

But she seemed satisfied to drop the questions about his programming.

He settled in on the back of the moogle, carefully out of petting range without being so far as to discourage conversation. He knew he should be finding out as much as possible from the Wutaiian princess (a whole body of literature was emerging in Midgar about the state of relations with the “sleeping dragon” and foreign relations couldn’t be hurt by some inside information…) but every time he’d been able to get her into a conversation, she managed to steer it back toward the technology supporting he Cait Sith robot. Clearly, she was as interested in Eastern advances in robotics as he was in the Western political landscape. 

As if on cue she asked, “So does your moogle run on clockwork, or does it use a mako battery?”

Reeve wondered whether he was breaking any Shinra non-disclosure policies by answering, but figured as long as he wasn’t handing her a blueprint it couldn’t hurt to seem transparent, “My moogle has a specially designed materia core to provide power. It’s programming runs the movement,” he tapped a foot on the furry white head, “Hop to it!”

The moogle complied, bouncing in place on its soft feet and waving its arms and little wings while the cat rocked on top of it. 

“So a materia battery?” Yuffie asked, eyes tracking their movement up and down. 

Reeve stilled the robots, “Not exactly,” he paused and considered the nature of state secrets, “But, I guess that’s the best way to put it.” 

“Hmm,” Yuffie agreed, and looked back to the fire. 

Seeing that he had lost her immediate attention, Reeve set the little AI to run automatically with the sensors turned up, and started his day Shinra. 

He ran into Mayor Domino while he was refilling his coffee, the man looking as sullen as he did every morning. They made small talk about organizing the data archives – Reeve hoping to grease some wheels to get his intel in a less redacted form. 

Ultimately, the conversation went nowhere. It wasn’t as if he didn’t understand the man’s resentment at being used as the city librarian. It would be a terrible shame to work his way up to an executive title, to have top level clearance, and to be stuck doing entry level clerical work from his corner office. Or piloting a stuffed moogle on the other side of the planet.


	6. Chapter 6

It was late the next day when, in the middle of a long presentation from one of Shinra’s subcontractors, the Cait Sith AI picked up a sequence of keywords alerting Reeve to check in. 

He excused himself from the meeting and slipped out the conference room at the same time that he let his mind’s eye focus on the other end of his neural link. After Gongaga they had started loading the large moogle into the storage compartment of the buggy, it being too much trouble for anyone – even Reeve – to fit the giant thing into the human-sized seats. As a result, the little robot cat was strapped into the back row of the vehicle with his feet swinging above the ground like a child on a family vacation. 

Tifa was leaning over the bench ahead of him, dark-honey eyes watching him and clearly waiting for a response. 

“Ah, sorry, you caught me in a little cat nap,” he cocked his head and hoped it passed as an excuse, “what was that Miss Tifa?” 

“What was it like for you, living at the Gold Saucer?” she asked, clearly repeating herself.

He looked further up the rows of the vehicle – stopped now, he noticed. Tifa was alone in the row ahead of him, and in front of her Aeris rubbed Yuffie’s back and cast repeated healing spells while the girl groaned softly with her head pressed against the window. In an open space between the women and the drivers Red XIII paced and panted, clearly as distressed as Yuffie by the moving vehicle but managing it with a great deal more stoicism. In the front row Cloud and Barret had their heads bent over a large map, disagreeing about the directions in low voices. 

“Busy,” he said without thinking, then tried to remember everything he could about the place from the short time he’d spent there, “always busy all hours of the day. People coming and going from all over the world on all different schedules, not a lot of sense of day or night.” 

Reeve smiled, and the little cat did too. It wasn’t so different from describing his life now, in that sense. 

“Did you like it?” she asked. 

“Sure,” he answered, and made the little robot stretch and yawn to support the story of just having been awakened, not so much because he thought it would make the sleeping robot story more believable, but because Shinra’s intelligence team had briefed him extensively on the kinds of gestures that would increase an empathetic response to his avatar. It made him feel like dirt.

“What about it?” the young woman asked him, smiling. She rested her chin on her folded arms to watch him over the back of the seat. 

“Uh,” he blinked at her, trying to think of something. Somehow, these questions had never come up in his cover story, “I suppose I was programmed to like it.” 

It sounded flimsy to him, but Tifa gave a tiny nod, “but you left. You’re more than just your programming, aren’t you?”

Her voice was sympathetic but there was something shrewd in her expression that made Reeve want to squirm. His file on Tifa didn’t have a lot in it. She’d survived the incident in Nibleheim five years ago and found her way to Midgar, opened a bar as soon as she was legally able to, and at some point had fallen in with the eco-terrorist group AVALANCHE, although there were no reports of her being particularly active within the group. A smart and ambitious young woman who Reeve thought would have done extremely well inside the Shinra company if she’d had any interest. Clearly, she was quite good as a bartender too, since she seemed to be asking all the questions he didn’t have the answers for without it ever sounding like an interrogation. 

“My program has an adaptive algorithm,” he supplied, staying as near to the truth as possible, “I’m able to learn over time. My manufacturer thought it would be important for me to think independently.” 

She smiled, “Well, I’m grateful for that. It’s good to have you here.” 

Her kindness – even with its edge of suspicion – made him feel even worse, and he pressed to deflect the conversation, “And what brought you here Miss Tifa?” 

“Me? Oh…” a tiny frown formed between her brows, then was gone, “I suppose no one’s given you the full story yet. I left Midgar with the others – everyone except you and Yuffie, I mean – when we had nowhere else to go back to. You know about the plate fall in Sector 7?”

Reeve did, entirely too well. His mouth twisted with distaste and he tried not to let it show through the robot, just nodding. 

“I had friends there, we all did,” Tifa’s mouth turned down at the corners, “Good people, they helped when I first arrived in Midgar and didn’t know anyone or anything about the city. After Nibleheim burned… Well, I didn’t have much left. I guess I don’t have much left now, either.” 

All the files Shinra had given him hadn’t prepared him for the way she turned away. She made a show of stretching out her back, but he could see that the tension was worse instead of better. 

He was saved trying to think of what he could answer to that when the buggy’s engine rumbled and kicked in, whatever navigational upset that had caused the stop clearly resolved. Cloud guided the vehicle forward with confidence along its new route, although Cait Sith could pick up Barret’s grumbling above the hum of the engine. 

Aeris and Tifa made eye contact and began to giggle, and Reeve felt the bafflement of having missed the joke. His bemusement was clarified when Tifa turned back to him, her tight expression of a few moments before replaced with conspirational amusement, “So what do you think of those two?” 

“Those two?” he echoed, and Tifa looked again between him and Aeris, who was still grinning, but had had returned to her task of trying to calm the motion sick teenager. 

Tifa gestured over her shoulder toward the front of the cab, where Barret was arguing something about seasonal water levels and river crossings, “ _Those_ two.”

She raised her eyebrows meaningfully and Reeve suddenly understood what she was talking about. He directed the little cat’s attention to the pair in the front, just as Barret’s volume peaked with an accusation involving the phrase “spikey-haired ass,” and all at once he saw it – like one of the magic pictures that shifts and becomes a sailboat when you look at it just _so_. 

“Oh,” Cait Sith said. _They really should have picked a woman for this job_ , Reeve reflected as he trotted down the stairs toward the 61st, having given up on the meeting and deciding to grab a copy of the minutes when they became available. _I’m not good at this stuff_. 

In a strange way he supposed it did make sense. He’d thought that Tifa and Cloud were an item, or possibly Cloud and Aeris. But when he thought about it directly, it did seem odd – he hadn’t really noticed any relationships within the group. He remembered during the war, in the tight working groups he’d been a part of, there were always entanglements forming, breaking apart, forming in some new constellation; it seemed to be a dynamic of people in close quarters and under pressure that wasn’t forming in the AVALANCHE group. 

“Oh,” he said again, and then noticed Tifa frowning at him. 

“You ok, Cait?” then added in a low voice with a glance over her shoulder to see if anyone was listening, “You aren’t programmed to be homophobic, are you?” 

Reeve sputtered and was glad that the little cat wasn’t programmed to reflect that reaction, answering, “No, I just… didn’t know. Are they really?”

Tifa shrugged, “Not exactly, I don’t think. Not yet at least.” 

She looked back at Aeris and they grinned at each other again, as if this was some kind of sport they’d been following, and Reeve pinched the bridge of his nose. Wutai had the right idea – Shinra _definitely_ should have chosen a woman for this job. 

He looked to the front of the buggy, at the young man who had become the leader of AVALANCHE in the face of all reason, and somehow also the axle on which the team wheel turned. Like Tifa, the file Shinra had handed him about the mercenary had been flimsy at best. A young man from a destroyed town, some association with the SOLDIER program – now terminated – and an unspecified connection with Sephiroth. 

“Forgive me saying Miss Tifa, but I thought maybe you and Cloud had –”

Tifa shook her head and waved a hand at him, but she looked pleased and embarrassed in spite of her protest, and Reeve filed that away too. Maybe there was a reason that Cloud had fallen naturally into the leadership role. By chance or by design, he had failed to favour any of his team members over the others, and sidestepped the destabilizing influence that would have created. 

“No, no,” Tifa kept waving her hand at him past when it made sense to stop, and Reeve let himself smile a little watching the young woman protest a bit too hard, “I’m just happy to see him again, you know? We grew up together and… and it’s just really good to have him back.” 

When Cait Sith went too long without answering, Tifa leaned over the back of the bench and ruffled the fur on the top of the little cat’s head, “What about you? Any lady cat-robots in your life you haven’t told us about?” 

Reeve laughed out loud in the stair well, startling an intern, and almost wasn’t bothered by the way the neural link projected the feeling of her patting the top of his head. 

Cait Sith waved his arms and then shrugged, “Nope, not for me. Not built that way, you know.” 

“Oh my _gawd_ ,” Yuffie cut in, groaning, “How can you even talk about this stuff right now?”

Tifa chuckled and tickled under Cait Sith’s chin another second before she turned to join Aeris, trying to get the girl through her motion sickness. 

He was relieved to let the subject drop, but he couldn’t help wondering about the strange balance in the group, mind lingering over it even as he wandered into the cafeteria for a ginger drink to help settle his own stomach.


	7. Chapter 7

Reeve couldn’t bring himself to gather too much information on Red XIII. 

He may have been a Shinra employee, and he did generally feel that if a person was taking the long view the company did more good than harm. But he wasn’t naïve either. He had a good sense of the fate in store for the Cosmo Beast if he fell back into Shinra’s custody (some of it he had seen first-hand while his neural implants were being installed and tested) and didn’t think it was fit for a sentient being. 

The less he became involved with Red XIII, Reeve felt, the less able he would be to compromise his freedom and safety later. Red XIII wasn’t his primary objective, after all. 

The distance he was trying to achieve was becoming more difficult as they traveled west, however. By the time the earth turned deep red and the forests gave way to plains and then to desert and cliffs, he found that Red XIII wasn’t allowing him the space to remain neutral. 

Reeve had read the substantial Shinra file on the creature multiple times and felt acquainted with the history of the individual as well as the species, but he suspected that the information he _didn’t_ have could fill an even larger file. There were piles of biological records and genetic information – almost nothing about culture or behavior. 

The way the Cosmo Beast was watching him more and more closely, projecting what Reeve believed (as near as he could tell on the inhuman face) to be some combination of suspicion and speculation, made him wonder what else the creature was seeing. Obviously the little cat would be perceived differently by a non-human, Reeve knew, as it had been designed by and for humans. But how much differently he wasn’t sure – did the gears of the robots’ movement sound loud to Red XIII? Could he hear the crackle of materia energy powering the units? Did he sense the EMF produced by the robots’ connection to somewhere far away? 

Reeve felt these were questions that really should have been better answered before he was thrown in at the deep end. But of course, it had become too late to regret it as soon as AVALANCHE had arrived at the Gold Saucer. 

The speculative looks were becoming more frequent every time the red buggy came to a halt. 

“How fast are you?” Red XIII finally asked him as the team set up camp a day past their river crossing (Barret had been proven right regarding Cloud's initial heading, and they’d had to detour significantly inland to find a passable ford - leading to heckling from the team and moaning from Yuffie). 

“Fast?” Reeve echoed. The time difference between AVALANCHE and Midgar had been a solid ten hours for the past days, and while it had given him a chance to finally get back to his condo and water the plants, his sleep had been relegated to a series of naps throughout the day and night. His thinking was beginning to feel sluggish. “My moogle is designed for strength and durability. It tops out at about 20 kilometers per hour.” 

_Downhill, with the wind at its back,_ Reeve added internally. The clock on the coffee maker read 3:27AM when he dumped a packet of grounds into the filter and switched it on. 

The red beast shook his head back and forth, the gesture disconcertingly human, “No, I know the moogle is slow. How fast is the cat?” 

Reeve paused with his hand halfway into the cupboard, hovering above a mug. The cat half of Cait Sith had been designed for stealth, small spaces, loaded up with sensors and recording equipment. It was a substantially more complex and delicate machine than the moogle it rode on. 

“Pretty fast, I think,” the little robot answered. Reeve had it do a quick spin around its perch on the larger robot’s back, and immediately regretted it as the kitchen spun around him. 

“Good,” Red XIII nodded, “Come with me.” 

“Just me?” Cait Sith asked, and Reeve reflexively twisted Cait Sith's fingers into the moogle’s white fur. The cat robot hadn’t been damaged since before Gongaga, owing largely to Reeve’s more careful control of the moogle - putting it out front and letting it take the brunt of monster attacks. Cheerfully, the neural link only communicated damage happening to the cat. He hadn’t realized how much sense of security that had given him until he was asked to surrender it. 

When Red XIII only watched him expectantly, he let the cat slide from its perch, booted feet sending up puffs of red dust as he landed. From his lower vantage point, the Cosmo Beast seemed enormous, all yellow eyes and long canines. 

Before he was able to protest or change his mind, Red XIII turned away, “Let’s go.”

“Go?” Cait Sith asked, but the creature was already off ahead of him in a flash of red fur, and Reeve began to chase after him, awkward and slow on the cat’s short legs in spite of his previous assertion. 

Frustrated and falling behind, he looked down at the megaphone in his hand, then threw it aside and dropped to all fours, trying to get extra speed out of the machine. 

It worked.

Awkward at first, then more smoothly as the onboard AI compensated for Reeve’s inexperience, the little cat picked up speed. He raced after the bigger creature, eyes fixed on the tail flame like a beacon as he swerved around rocks and jumped fallen debris, his perspective inches from the ground. 

In Midgar Reeve grabbed the counter for stability, reminding himself that he wasn’t really there as the low vantage point tried to convince his senses that he was in a perpetual forward tumble. In a few moments, Cait Sith had caught up to Red XIII, who he realized had been holding back to see if the robot would catch up. 

“Alright?” Red XIII asked him as they loped along the base of a cliff, moogle and megaphone and the rest of AVALANCHE already nearly left behind. 

He considered the question. The feeling of falling had been partially remedied when Reeve let himself sink onto the kitchen floor, cold tiles reassuringly solid under his legs even as he let his eyes slip closed to fully inhabit the cat. The oddness of running with his hands was secondary to the experience of speed so near to the ground, rocks that he would step over as a man requiring a planned leap or swerve to navigate in his smaller body. 

“Yeah, alright,” he decided, falling into pace beside the larger animal. 

“Good,” Red XIII answered, “Then let’s scout the area for monsters before everyone settles in for the night.” 

Red XIII’s gentle trot broke into a full run and it took a couple of false starts for Reeve to get the little robot up to speed, forcing himself to trust that the AI would react where he couldn’t and keep itself intact. And if something did happen, he found that he trusted Red XIII to keep the cat healed and whole. 

It felt selfish, placing his trust in the other being to keep him safe when he wasn’t able to guarantee the same thing in return. But in the rush of speed and movement under the extended sunset of Cosmo Canyon, grounded by the red earth move past under his hands, the _why_ of his being there fell away under the exhilaration of running like a wild thing. 

As the clock ticked past 4AM in his Midgar condo’s kitchen, Shinra felt very far away.


	8. Chapter 8

Cait Sith ran a wide patrol around the campsite with Red XIII three times before they trotted back into the camp, sun sinking behind the cliffs and red desert dust heavy in their fur. 

“Thank you,” the Cosmo Beast had rumbled to him in his low tones, “It has been... some time since I ran with pack.”

In Midgar Reeve staggered upright from his kitchen floor on numb legs, mind still sailing through the canyons with the joy of movement. “Oh,” he said simultaneous with the Cait Sith, elation damped all at once. Of course, there were no others of his race for Red XIII to run with. And of course, no human would ever keep up. 

“Thank you sharing that with me,” Reeve answered him, filling a mug with burnt coffee from the carafe on the counter. He’d only just discovered the exhilaration of racing through the desert on his borrowed robotic limbs, and the thought of never doing it again filled him with an unexpected sense of anxiety and loss, “I’d... like to go again, if there’s a chance.” 

The creature rumbled a noise that seemed positive and nodded silently before padding away on noiseless paws to speak with Cloud. 

Cait Sith was halfway across camp, using one of the moogle’s tiny wings as a foothold to climb back to his perch when he realized he was being watched. 

“Barret?” he chirped in the little cat’s voice, sitting feline style with his tail wrapped around his paws. He cocked his head to the side when he saw Barret had noticed being noticed. 

At some point in the previous days the locket looped around the man’s wrist had migrated to hang from his neck beside the dog tags, around the same time that he had stopped moving through space like an open wound. Reeve had never quite figured out how to ask, and figured maybe it was just as well – a memento wasn’t his objective in following AVALANCHE, after all. 

In Midgar Reeve made his way into the living room and sank into the plush sofa (a giant thing chosen when he was first promoted out of his cubicle some years before), propping his stiff legs on the coffee table (his mother wasn’t there to see him) and cradling the terrible coffee in his lap. 

“You’re a damn mess,” Barret told him, and for a brief, dissonant moment Reeve started to take his feet off the table before realizing that Barret was talking to the cat. 

He let his eyes slipped closed and back to Cosmo Canyon, where Cait Sith was examining his previously white paws and belly, turned the same brilliant sienna of the cliffs even in the desert twilight. 

“Oh.” 

The large man in front of him made a loud exhalation that wasn’t quite a word but still sounded amused, before reaching out to brush at the cat’s fur like a disapproving parent (which, Reeve supposed, he was). 

“Oh, hey, geez!” the cat protested, hoping and twisting as Barret’s large hand stirred a cloud of dust from its fur. 

Reeve twisted, mirrored by the robot, to get away from the phantom hand that patted him down, and hissed when it resulted in a lapful of hot coffee. 

Cait Sith in Cosmo Canyon hissed along with him, but the noise came out cartoonish and comical – as designed – eliciting a chuckle from the man. He stopped trying to pat the dust out of Cait Sith’s fur though, so Reeve had to assume it had been effective anyway. 

The cat robot shook itself, to shake off the dust and to settle its fur back in place. The effort kicked up another red cloud, leaving rust colored streaks where it settled on top of the moogle. 

“Y’know, my daughter, Marlene, she’d love having something like you around to play with,” Barret cocked his head to one side, scratching at his beard unconsciously, “Are there consumer models of, uh, whatever you are?” 

“Consumer... Oh no, not me! I’m one of a kind!” the little cat gave a toothy smile, eyes crinkling charmingly ( _Well, for the most part,_ Reeve amended inside his own head while trying to sponge coffee out of the sofa cushions in Midgar), “And my design is awfully complex, not recommended for children under ten years of age!” 

“Huh, I suppose,” Barret looked disappointed, and Reeve’s hand stilled on the sofa, giving the question his full attention. 

“You could... get her an actual cat, maybe?” Cait Sith suggested. The robot mimed cleaning his ears, rubbing at first one and then the other. Reeve rubbed thoughtfully at the same spot on himself at the sensation, deciding it wasn’t so bad when he did it himself. 

“Nah,” Barret shook his head, “Don’t have the lifestyle for a cat. It’s one thing to find a babysitter for Marlene, but if she showed up with a whole damn menagerie?”

Cait Sith nodded, unsure how to answer. In the silence Barret looked away, eyes focusing on some distant horizon point while his fingers sought out the chain at his neck

“But I worry she gets lonely. The things I do, I’ve always got her in mind. The planet, her future… But it can’t be good for her to have me gone all the time. She’s lost so much already.”

Reeve found himself considering, sitting there on his condo floor with a sponge in his hand in the middle of damn night, that Barret wasn’t limited to the man who blew up the Midgar reactors. It was a worse than flimsy excuse for conducting the terror attacks that resulted in dozens of deaths and doing billions in infrastructure damage to the city, but it was something. 

“It must be hard, being a parent,” Cait Sith chirped, tilting its head to one side pensively. 

“Heh,” Barret looked back at him, “You don’t know the half of it… And here I am pouring out my troubles to robot of all things.”

“I’m an advanced AI!” Cait Sith corrected him, but the man had clearly stopped listening. 

“Must be gettin’ emotional ‘cause we’re so close to Cosmo Canyon,” he mused, and before Reeve could ask for clarification Barret was reaching out a massive hand to scratch behind the little robot’s ears. 

Reeve groaned as the touch tingled from his shoulder blade up the entire side of his face, and dropped his face onto the stained sofa in defeat. It was _definitely_ weirder when it was someone else touching the little cat. He put his hands over his ears, realizing too late that that he was still holding the wet sponge. 

It was no good, he was just going to have to hire a cleaner for the sofa. 

By the time he’d collected himself enough to answer, Barret was already halfway across the campsite starting a mock-argument with Yuffie. 

_Emotional about Cosmo Canyon?_ Reeve wondered, watching in his mind as Barret settled in to listen to Yuffie’s enthusiastic explanation of some materia pairings, nodding patiently as she waved her arms to accentuate a point. 

He wondered what kind of man Barret had been before Corel burned. He had what was in the file – a family man, active member of the community and well regarded in the town. Widowed during the accident in Corel and raising someone else’s child. Seeking revenge against the Shinra corporation for what he believed to be a deliberate attack against his home and family. Reeve supposed anyone would be damaged by that, looking for someone to blame for the whim of the gods. Not everyone would have started launching terror attacks against the power company, though. 

With a sigh Reeve stood up and went to throw the sponge back into the kitchen, hoping he might grab a couple more hours sleep in his own bed before he needed to be back in the office.


	9. Chapter 9

It had been at least a decade since Reeve had last been in Cosmo Canyon, a much younger man in the middle of wartime. 

The village carved out of the cliff face was familiar and alien to him when they arrived, seen through the little cat’s eyes. The natural protection of its topography, combined with its eastern location on the central continent, had lent itself well to being set up as a listening station for Shinra forces tracking Wutaiian communications and naval operations. Reeve remembered receiving the news that he was being pulled from his graduate work to do live intelligence analysis – shocked but guiltily relieved not to be sent to the front. He’d been stationed in the canyon for a little more than a year before Shinra had promoted him out of the position and he’d begun to accelerate through his department. 

The red cliffs of the canyon were as he remembered them, as was the listening equipment that protruded from the walls as if grown there organically – but the differences stood out more. At the time, Cosmo Canyon had bustled with activity, a constant stream of Shinra personnel coming and going. There had never been a reactor installed (the background noise of extraction too disruptive to the sensitive listening equipment) but the place had glowed at all hours from expending the stored energy of mako batteries.

The quiet village moving peacefully through time under the shadow of its massive wind turbines seemed like it came out of a different universe from the one he remembered.

“Grandpa! I’m home!” Red XIII had shouted as he accelerated away from the group, barely remembering to ask the guard to allow them in. The stir of excitement from those in the group who had heard of the outpost and its clean energy projects washed over Reeve as he tried to reconcile this place with the one he remembered. 

Soon though Cloud had split off with Tifa and Barret, the three deep in conversation about the origins of AVALANCHE, to see the observatory perched on the highest cliff. Reeve found his robot-self wandering the town with Aeris and Yuffie.

“They really don’t use mako energy here,” Aeris marveled, examining the lanterns that lit the homes and businesses carved into the cliff face, “It’s so quiet.” 

“You mean boring,” Yuffie sulked, kicking at a rock and sending it clattering along the hewn path. 

“Don’t you hear the...” Aeris hesitated when Yuffie looked at her skeptically, “the quiet?”

“Exactly!” Yuffie agreed, “how do they all stand it?” 

“I suppose they manage somehow,” Aeris said, and smiled. She ran her hand across the rock that made the side of an archway, pausing there for an extended moment while examining stone. Reeve would have sworn that she was listening to something they couldn’t hear – and the little cat’s sensors provided him with very, very good hearing. 

Soon though they were moving again, and Reeve let the robots trail behind as the girls discovered the town, chatting with the locals and browsing in the shops. It was the middle of the night in Midgar and he found himself drifting in and out of their conversation, dozing in an armchair with NeoMidgar plans scattered on the coffee table in front of him (the cleaners had been in for the sofa earlier in the day, but had admonished him not to try sitting on it until it was completely dry). 

They were in the materia shop, Yuffie in frenetic discussion with the sleepy-eyed but good natured young store-keeper, when Red XIII found them again.

“How are you, Red?” Aeris asked him, Yuffie barely noticing that the Cosmo Beast had arrived past the tray of materia the young man had produced from beneath the counter.

“I am well,” Red XIII nodded, “It is… very good to be home.” 

“Is your family well?” Aeris asked, and Reeve smiled to himself, watching the young woman assuring herself of everyone’s wellbeing as naturally as breathing. 

“My grandfather is the same as ever, and I am glad,” the Cosmo Beast answered, then looked between the three of them, “You should come see grandfather’s observatory. He loves showing people his machines.” 

“That sounds wonderful,” Aeris turned to Cait Sith, and Reeve and the little cat nodded. 

“I’d like to see that,” Reeve agreed in Cait Sith’s bright chirp, stirring fully from his doze and stretching, trying to clear the sleep from his mind. 

He had access to the observatory schematics from the Shinra files, and his own experience from wartime although he’d never been the operator of any of the equipment, but he was curious to see if any modifications had been made to the devices in the intervening years. It wasn’t inconceivable that there could be a use for the old Shinra tech doing geological surveys before breaking ground on the NeoMidgar project. 

“Yuffie?” Aeris asked. 

“Nuh,” the teenager waved a hand at them without turning around, “I’m gonna stay here with Sam.” 

The young man behind the counter colored but didn’t object, and Reeve found himself sharing a speculative look with Aeris before they followed Red XIII out of the little shop. 

“Up the ladder?” Reeve craned the little cat’s neck. There was a small hatch at the top, weathered with age and use. He remembered racing up and down the rungs without a second thought as a young man, and suffered another moment of temporal dissonance. 

“Yes, but –” 

Reeve didn’t wait for the ‘but’ – he balanced his weight back on the little cat’s haunches then leaped, grabbing at the ladder halfway up and scrabbling the rest of the way, flying onto the lookout at the apex of the cliff. 

The view hadn’t changed and he caught his breath, the years falling away in his mind under the red skies of the canyon even as he sat in Midgar.

“Cait!” Aeris called after him, interrupting him before he could fully fall into reverie, “Cait!”

He poked his head over the side of the hatch, seeing Aeris smiling up at him from the floor below. 

“There’s a service elevator,” she told him, laughing, “Red’s going to take that. Do you want your moogle?” 

Reeve stared at her a long moment, then in Midgar began laughing aloud at himself at the same time that Cait Sith called “Yes please!” and began speaking voice commands into his megaphone for the moogle’s AI.

By the time he was done directing the moogle and strapping the megaphone away at the cat’s side, Aeris was already pulling herself up the top of the ladder and joining him on the lookout.

“It’s beautiful,” she said, and something about her tone as she said it rang so genuine that Reeve felt something clench inside. She gathered her skirt in one hand and lowered herself to sit beside him, looking out over the valley. The turbines looked like children’s toys where they were erected in the wind tunnel at the base of the cliffs, the lights of lanterns and the Cosmo Candle glowed like fireflies at twilight. 

“It’s not like you to be so impulsive,” Aeris observed.

“Ah, excitement got the better of me I guess,” Reeve admitted, Cait Sith’s tail twitched with feline embarrassment. She didn’t need to know why. 

“You’ve been different since we got here. Like you see something the rest of us don’t,” she softened the comment by reaching out and scratching at the back of the cat’s neck. 

Reeve cursed himself internally, rubbing at the back of his neck where the trail of her fingernails made the small hairs there stand on end. He hadn’t thought he’d been so obvious – he had just been so tired all the time for the past few weeks. 

“I could say the same thing about you, Miss Aeris,” he said instead of answering. 

She hummed in answer, fingers moving to tickle behind his ear and Reeve had to make a conscious effort not to move away while Cait Sith waited for the rest of himself to make its way up the freight elevator – courtesy of the accommodating residents of the canyon. 

He hopped atop the moogle in a single leap when Red XIII arrived with it trailing behind him. 

“You should come now,” Red XIII addressed Aeris, “Grandpa likes to go to bed early these days.” 

“Of course,” she smiled, using the Cosmo Beast’s shoulder to help herself up as organically as if he’d offered a hand. Reeve was struck again by the easy way Aeris had with people – all people – and wondered if it was a quality of the Ancients, or if it was something uniquely Aeris. 

Bugenhagen was floating by the door as they approached the lab. Reeve remembered him from his last stay in Cosmo Canyon, and the fantastic old hippie had hardly changed in the decade or so in between – long hair and robes and the lot. The man had protested the war and the soldiers stationed in the canyon, at the time, but not to the point that he hadn’t embraced the installation of the listening equipment, enchanted by the potential of the machines from a scientific perspective. 

“Hoooo,” he peered over their party, eyes going to Aeris, “You must be the Cetra.” 

“Cetra?” Aeris asked, glancing between Red XIII and Cait Sith. Reeve shrugged with the little cat.

“Don’t worry,” Bugenhagen waved his arm, “You’ll understand soon. Come in, come in. You too Nanaki – I know you think all these machines are boring but you’d do well to know how to use them.” 

There was something undeniably comical about watching the massive Cosmo Beast, all bristling fur and battle scars, getting jollied along by the little old hippie as if he was a difficult child. Reeve caught himself smiling again as the followed the others into the observatory.

“I showed your friends a little while ago,” Bugenhagen bustled along, “but I’ve got everything set up for another go, just follow me through this way and –”

He was interrupted by a sonorous moan that shook through the building, making Reeve’s ears ring with feedback as the cat robot’s sensors tried to process the sound. In front of Cait Sith, Aeris cried out before her knees buckled. 

Almost without thought, he sent the big moogle forward to grab her as she fell, supporting her in its plush arms. 

“Aeris!” Red XIII stood on his back legs, bracing himself against the moogle as it caught her, and there was a murmured “oh dear,” from Bugenhagen somewhere in the background. 

Cait Sith crouched low on the moogle, reaching out to pat Aeris on the shoulder with one of his tiny paws. 

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said softly, moving to stand as quickly as she had fallen, Red XIII dropping down to offer her space, “I don’t know what came over me. Thanks, Cait.” 

She reached out and patted the big moogle on its fluffy white head, and Reeve felt a moment of strange jealousy of the large robot, almost wanting to correct her assumption and tell her that he was only inhabiting the cat on top – but he squashed that thought quickly ( _Hey, I’m up here!_ A tired, manic part of his brain supplied, but he ignored it).

“The cries of the planet,” Bugenhagen supplied, “You’re very sensitive. Maybe… maybe it’s better that you don’t come to the observatory tonight. I will adjust the machines. Come by tomorrow.” 

Aeris nodded, clearly still rattled. 

“You’d better get some rest Miss Aeris,” Reeve added through the little cat. She looked terribly pale, and Reeve found himself worrying in a way that had no connection to his role as a Shinra agent, “Let’s get you back to the inn.” 

She nodded, and a subdued Red XIII led them back to the service elevator. 

\---

With Aeris ensconced in one of the cozy cave rooms provided by the inn, Reeve had felt secure letting the Cait Sith AI take over for a time while he headed to the office, hoping to miss the morning rush of commuters. 

He had just set his computers to start booting and was stepping out of his office to the 61st for a coffee and some breakfast when he saw Tseng walking toward his office with purpose, the Turks back in Midgar after their errand with Scarlet. 

Reeve frowned and stepped back into his office, holding it open for the man to follow him. 

“I saw you in Gongaga,” Tseng told him without preamble, “You need to be more careful.” 

“More careful?” Reeve answered, affronted, “Your people were all over the city, how the hell was I supposed to avoid them all?”

“What were you doing at the reactor in the first place? I had to cover for you,” Tseng said calmly as if he hadn’t just been sworn at by a senior executive. 

Reeve nearly growled, “My job. Following AVALNCHE and Sephiroth. Should I have politely asked the insurgent group with a special interest in mako reactors to kindly step away from that particular one?” 

Tseng’s answering look suggested that ideally, that was exactly what Reeve would have done, and it made him angrier.

“And anyway, when the hell was someone going to tell me that Hojo’s gone missing? His experimental tech is _inside my head!_ ” 

Tseng frowned, “Heidegger suggested it was better that you not get distracted in the middle of a critical assignment. The team responsible for developing the tech is still on hand and the... Hojo situation... is under control.” 

Reeve clenched his fist, feeling his teeth grinding and had to make a directed effort to stop as Tseng continued. 

“My people were there to sweep the area for potential threats before Scarlet arrived. The weapons development team is currently researching the Huge Materia that’s been created in our breeder reactors... Between us, any information that might cross your path in your, ahh, _other occupation_ would be greatly appreciated.”

Reeve was still irritated, “Your people didn’t do a very good job of sweeping, in that case. AVALANCHE ran them off in a matter of minutes.” 

Tseng cocked his head to one side, “What makes you think AVALANCHE was the objective? You obviously had that situation well in hand.” 

Reeve grunted his assent, not particularly appeased. He considered how much he could ask Tseng about the situation in Gongaga without being impolitic, and decided that there was no love lost between Public Security and Weapons Research, “Seems like Scarlet’s been given a long lead since the new President took control.” 

Tseng smirked slighty, “Our young President is still in the process of learning on the job. These are difficult times.” 

Reeve liked Rufus, he really did. But years of boarding school and private tutors had resulted in a very well educated but very sheltered young man in the unfortunate position of taking over a critical position under difficult circumstances. 

“I suppose we’ll have to see how he handles the current crisis,” Reeve conceded. As the Turk was turning to leave, Reeve thought to asked him, “Do you know anything about the situation in Gongaga? The relief effort, I mean. The cleanup project from a few years ago was clearly never completed.” 

Tseng shrugged, “Well, you know these small regimes. You show the people in control a little bit of power and money and they’ll take it and run, and suddenly nothing’s getting done any more...” 

Reeve frowned – not knowing Gongaga to have suffered any acute political corruption – but had to admit he hadn’t followed the situation as closely as he might have. 

Tseng let himself out, and Reeve found he was no longer in the mood for breakfast. 

In lieu of heading down to the company food court, Reeve dropped into his chair and spun to stare out the window, watching the sun trying to rise through the heavy smog of the city. Everything in Midgar always seemed to grey. Even the walls of his office were grey, he noted suddenly, wrinkling his nose involuntarily. A pale, soothing grey that some designer must have put some thought into, but grey all the same. He sighed and let his eyes drop closed, his mind drifting back to inhabit the cat. 

In Cosmo Canyon, the group had gathered around the Cosmo Candle beneath a sky full of stars, quiet but for the crackle of the fire and the distant hum of turbines. The soft conversations and calm companionship flowed out into the night uninterrupted by the noises of Midgar. 

\---

By the time Reeve arrived home hours later (a briefcase full of meeting minutes and contractor proposals in one hand, a bag of Wutaiian takeaway in the other), the group in Cosmo Canyon was already stirring and beginning their day. Cloud and Barret had agreed to accompany Red XIII on some expedition through the back of the canyon, and Reeve felt a pang at the easy camaraderie shared by the three, moving through one another’s space and trading equipment back and forth without needing to speak. 

Not that he was prepared to drop his real life and run off to join the cause of a rogue eco-terrorist movement running around in the mountains. He’d had some contact with early iterations of AVALANCHE when he’d been stationed near them, and it was all a little too much tree hugging and mysticism for him to take seriously. But as much as he disagreed with their ideology there was something undeniably appealing about the way they worked together seamlessly, without the piles of meetings and red tape and interdepartmental squabbling. 

The knot in his stomach eased a little when Aeris patted Cait Sith on the head before going to see the others off, crouching to adjust Red XIII’s hair clip and admonishing them all to stay safe. 

“I’m still feeling a little out of sorts,” Aeris admitted to him once the three had set out, after Yuffie had slid out to spend another day with the young materia salesman and before Tifa had made her way down to join them, steadfastly _not_ a morning person. 

Reeve let himself drift back and forth between the Inn’s small tavern where the young women were tucking into the breakfast options (locally sourced and vegetarian, he noticed with some amusement) and the proposals that had taken over his coffee table again. As the morning ( _evening_ he corrected himself in Midgar) wore on they were joined by the local elders, who filled the cozy dining room with myths and legends of the Cetra.

It was almost enough to let himself forget that he wasn’t really there.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter warning for canon PTSD, dealt with by well meaning people who are nevertheless under-qualified to deal with it. 
> 
> To skip, stop reading at "In Midgar he went out for breakfast. " and proceed to next chapter.

Barret and Cloud returned to the Inn late in the day looking haggard – around the same time Reeve started getting ready for his day in Midgar. 

Cloud slumped onto the bench between the girls and dropped his head into his arms. The girls automatically each placed a hand on his shoulder from either side, raising eyebrows at one another over his back and clearly having some unspoken conversation that was beyond Reeve’s understanding. 

He didn’t have time to contemplate the meaning of their silent exchange, as a moment later Cait Sith was being scooped from atop the moogle and cradled in Barret’s massive arms while the man’s good hand patted absently at the cat's back. 

In Midgar Reeve nearly choked on his toothbrush, watching his own wide-eyed surprise unfold in the bathroom mirror. _He thinks you’re a cat. He thinks you’re a cat. Don’t lose it._

“Sad day,” Barret rumbled, and Reeve felt the deep voice resonating through the little robot’s body, “Good too, but sad. Red’s talking with his Grandpa now.” 

“Buggy’s good to go,” Cloud added, “We’ll head out in the morning.”

\---

They did head out the next morning, the team largely refreshed – although Yuffie grumbled and Red XIII was unusually subdued. 

The next night they spent sleeping in the loft of a largely disused barn, rented from a farmer along the poorly maintained track to Nibleheim. The man had been excited to see the flash of gil when Tifa inquired about the space, and it had come out that his fields had been less productive year by year since the reactor was installed in the mountains near the town. There were still some plow Chocobos in the first stalls, heavy and strong, but most of the barn stood empty aside from some abandoned equipment. 

“He knew my father,” Tifa told them later as they began carrying sleeping bags into the loft, “Said dad used to come out and work on his tractors for him.” 

Aeris squeezed her arm silently, and Tifa smiled, “Wanted to know where all of you guys came from, though.” 

It was still painfully early morning for Reeve, but on a Saturday it hardly seemed to make any difference, the weekend stretching in front of him with all its rich opportunity to finish what he couldn’t during the week and pay back some sleep debt – possibly even get out of the city and see fresh air first hand rather than through the vicarious experience of his robot avatar. Of course, AVALANCHE apparently didn’t take weekends, but Shinra executives still did. At least nominally. 

As the team began climbing the creaking wooden stairs up to the loft, Cloud announced he would keep the first watch on his own, not expecting trouble on the remote farm. The giant moogle was unable to make the assent into the loft, but Cait Sith bounded freely up the stairs, darting ahead of the group and leaping onto a springy yellow bale of straw. There was an open space at the center where the stock had obviously run low, but piles of baled straw and greens still lined the side and back walls. 

The stack Reeve had chosen as his perch teetered wildly under him at the introduction of 30 kilograms of robotic cat, but balancing on it was a much easier matter than staying atop of the bouncing moogle. In a moment he was balanced, looking out the loft’s open hay door to where the sun was setting orange and purple over the Western Nibel Mountains, accompanied by the sound of some fat flies that buzzed lazily around the rafters.

“It’s so beautiful,” Aeris spoke by him, rubbing at the back of his neck before he had fully registered she was there. 

Reeve reached to rub at the same spot on himself, almost but not quite used to the idea of being petted. In the early morning light of his condo he padded into the kitchen and looked in the fridge, but saw only some aging takeaway from the week before and a few bottles of sparkling water. 

The note of awe in Aeris’s voice made him wonder how much she remembered of her life before Midgar – he knew that she had been young at the time she arrived – but surely not so young as to not remember the sunsets outside the Midgar slums…?

“Sure is,” Barret was answering before Cait Sith was able. The wooden boards making up the loft floor made an ominous noise under his weight, but held. The big man dropped onto some baled greens to one side of them and sent a whirl of motes into the light of sunset. 

“Was it always like this when you were growing up?” Aeris asked as Tifa dropped a sleeping bag down next to hers. It made a soft rustling noise in the loose straw blanketing the loft. 

“Yeah,” she answered, unrolling the bag, “When we were kids we’d have sleepovers in my friend’s barn any night it was warm enough. No parents, made us feel really independent – grown up, you know?” she sighed, “It even smells the same, the greens and the Chocobos and the mountains outside.” 

“That’s a nice way to grow up,” Barret murmured, looking far away, and Reeve assumed his was thinking about his daughter in Midgar. 

Tifa nodded but didn’t answer, dropping onto her bedding and staring out at the sunset. After a moment Aeris dropped down onto the sleeping bag next to her and leaned against her shoulder in silent support. 

As the group settled in for the night Reeve had his little avatar curl up on its high perch. Its nose tucked sweetly under a paw in a manner that the programming team had spent half a week figuring out.

In Midgar, he went out for breakfast. 

\---

Some hours later while he was reading over missed meeting minutes in a café near his home, Reeve’s attention fell back into the cat.

He first became aware of an acute silence, an absence of the soft snores and rustlings of sleeping humans. A tense silence was in its place. 

“What’s he doing?” one of the women whispered, although he couldn’t immediately identify which one. 

“Nothing, absolutely nothing. For... a while now.” 

The second voice belonged to Tifa, who crouched at the top of the stairs peering into the stable below.

The moon was full, and even without the robot’s enhanced night vision it would have been obvious that the team were up and tense. After a moment, he realized that the soft cooing and warking of the Chocobos below had also fallen silent. 

“Damnit, I thought we were done with this,” Barret said in a voice just loud enough to carry. 

“Maybe because we’re getting so close to... Well, you know,” Tifa stood and moved back to the center of the room, wrapping her arms around herself as she did. In a rustle of loose straw Red XIII was beside her and butting his head gently against her hip. Her hand fell absently into his mane and the set of her shoulders eased slightly. 

“Yeah, I know,” Barret agreed, “Okay, I got this.” 

“Thank you,” she answered as the man got to his feet and headed down the stairs.

As his head and shoulders disappeared from view his voice rose with a bark of “On your feet, SOLDIER!” 

There was a sound of scuffling on the floor below, followed by Barret ordering, “Alright, let’s go! Walk it off, walk it off!” 

“What are they –” Yuffie began to ask, but Aeris hushed her gently. 

The noise in the stable turned into the sound of two pairs of feet walking, then jogging, out the front and away toward the open field of crops. 

The sound of retreating footfalls was followed by another tense silence, seeming to stretch on a very long time before the sound of the men looped back, circled the barn, and trailed off toward the fields again. 

As the sound of running again passed out of hearing range Yuffie delivered a solid kick to a bale of greens. 

“Damnit!” she shouted, the curse sounding alien in her voice. After half a moment gave a second kick for good measure, “Stupid war!”

“Yuffie...” Tifa said softly, but didn’t seem to have anything else to follow it with. 

The Cait Sith robot cocked its head to one side. Reeve had seen a lot of combat fatigue following the war, manifested in a lot of different ways. He supposed they all had. 

It was still terrible, considering it through the eyes of the teenager. 

“It’s just...” Yuffie began pacing the small space, then kicked out again and contacted another bale with a small _whump,_ “Everything was supposed to get _better_ after the war. It was going to _fix_ everything. That’s what everyone said.” 

“Yuffie, I –” 

Tifa reached out to place a hand on the girl’s arm but she shook it off, “No! _No!_ Everything was supposed to get better, but now everybody’s poor, and all the men came home having these _fits,_ and nothing _grows_ any more –”

“ _Yuffie,_ ” Tifa said again, more forcefully, and when the teenager ignored her Tifa grabbed her in a bear hug to stop her pacing. Yuffie struggled for a few moments, and then started to cry. 

“I know,” Tifa said softly, “We know.”

“Was it like this before?”

Reeve looked around the room through his borrowed eyes and reflected that the women were all so _young_. They probably couldn’t remember a time before rationing and curfews and the draft. 

Red XIII spoke up instead, voice a low rumble in the silence, “There’s always another war.” 

Outside the sound of footsteps finished circling the barn again, retreating to leave only the soft warking of the birds below them.

Reeve found he couldn’t concentrate on his paperwork any longer. He paid his tab and headed for home.


	11. Chapter 11

Nearly an hour had passed in the night before Barret and Cloud climbed up into the loft, the latter looking clear eyed (if sheepish) and the former just looking tired. 

After the night’s disrupted sleep, the group stayed at the farm later than they had initially planned. Tifa took the opportunity to catch up with the owner and help with farm chores, while Yuffie and Aeris snuck small treats to the Chocobos. Visible through the open doors of the barn Red XIII lounged in the early sunlight, ears flicking away an occasional bluebottle. 

“I don’t see why we’re back to sleeping in tents and barns,” Reeve heard Yuffie complaining, even as she rubbed one of the Chocobos on the head. 

Cait Sith perched on the stairs to the loft, enjoying a high vantage point on the comings and goings of the barn while his moogle held a tractor aloft to give Tifa access to its inner workings. He swished his tail, catlike, and batted at the flies when they passed too near, working from a vague memory of his mother’s cat doing the same. The robot’s heightened hearing tracked the sleep-slow breathing and soft snores that still emerged from the loft above them.

“We could have stayed in Cosmo Canyon a while longer. The beds were nice. I liked the food,” Yuffie continued, wrinkling her nose and wiping her hand on her shorts as a Chocobo accepted some treats with more slobber than she had expected. 

“I thought it was too quiet and boring for you?” Aeris asked, passing the teenager a rag from near the feed bins so that she could wipe her hands properly. 

“Yeah, well, I got over it.” 

Tifa cleared her throat, peering out from beneath the tractor, “So it’s not anything to do with that new materia you’ve been carrying around the last few days?” 

“What? Of course not!” Yuffie answered, voice horrified, but she wrapped her hand protectively over the bangle at her wrist anyway.

“It wasn’t a present from Sam then?” Aeris teased her, and Yuffie huffed. 

“Oh my _gawd_ , you guys _suck._ ” 

But she looked quietly pleased in spite of her protests and Reeve found himself feeling a swell of affection for the girl, forgetting for a moment that she represented a serious point of political interest and threat for the Shinra company. 

He’d caught up on his week’s paperwork through the slow Saturday afternoon and drifted in and out of sleep on his newly-cleaned sofa, peering out through the eyes of the little cat at the brightly lit morning on the distant farmstead. He was almost disappointed when Cloud and Barret woke up and the group piled back into the buggy for the final stretch to Nibleheim. 

\---

It was late afternoon when Cloud parked on the outskirts of Nibleheim, and Cait Sith’s AI sent an alert that jerked Reeve out of his sleep, disoriented in the dark before realizing he was in his bedroom in Midgar at the same time that the cat robot was climbing out of the buggy into long grass and afternoon sunlight. He glanced at the clock by his bed, noticing he’d hardly been asleep for four hours. 

The town of Nibleheim stood, to the best of Reeve’s knowledge, the same as it always had – quaint and picturesque where it nestled at the bottom of the Nible mountains. The town square as they walked into town centered around an old well and water tower, some of the finer houses crowded around it before the streets branched off like spokes of a wheel. Looking through the neural link, he couldn’t see any sign of the disaster of five years before. The cleanup effort in Nibleheim, at least, appeared to have gone exactly to design. 

It didn’t take long before it was clear that Tifa and Cloud had not received news of the restoration effort. Their surprise at seeing the town, and the matching reactions of their teammates, spurred Reeve out of bed to check his files on the area. He couldn’t very well tell them that he’d worked on the budget for the project himself, but he could remind them of the publicity that had run at the time (both the downplaying of the Sephiroth _Incident_ and the major relief effort headed by Shinra when it sent a small army of contractors to put the town back in order and provide medical care for the injured).

Reeve went through the motions of making himself a tea while he waited for his laptop to boot, his mind mostly with Cait Sith as the group walked around the town square. 

“Is this some kind of sick joke?” Tifa asked, stopping in front of one of the houses, “This one is mine, but I watched it burn…”

“I remember. I remember the heat of the flames,” Cloud agreed, subdued. Tifa shot him an unreadable expression before forcefully pushing in the front door of the cottage. As the group moved to follow her, Cait Sith hopped from the back of his moogle and scooted between their feet in the narrow doorway so as not to be left behind. 

Inside, the home looked just the way he had expected from the outside – cozy and lived in – decorated with solid, functional furniture and family keepsakes. In Midgar, Reeve slid into a chair in front of his laptop with a mug of tea in easy reach and pulled up the files on Nibleheim. 

The file was... shorter than it should have been. He frowned and clicked back to the parent folder, and when there were no additional files he typed into the search function in case the Nibleheim files had been placed in the wrong directory. 

“Son of a bitch,” he stroked his beard absentmindedly while he went back to the document he’d found initially, and began to read around the black swathes of redaction. 

His attention was pulled completely back into the cat when he heard Tifa scream and saw her backing away from a black cloaked figure that stumbled after her out of a back room. 

“Sephiroth?” it asked them in a weak, genderless voice, and tilted its sallow features at each of them in turn before fixing on Cloud, “Reunion?” 

Without the cover of the powerful moogle, Cait Sith shrunk back when the sunken eyes moved over him, sheltering behind Barret’s legs without thinking, gripping at his megaphone more firmly and prepared to call the moogle if need be. 

It was Aeris that stepped forward from the group, interrupting the stranger’s fixation on Cloud by taking it by a hand and asking, “Are you alright?”

“Re…union?” it asked her, and a streak of black liquid fell from one eye like a tear before turning and stumbling back toward the rear of the house. 

Aeris shuddered, but didn’t turn away until the cloaked figure did, “She had a tattoo on her arm. The number five.” 

Reeve was relieved when he felt a large hand scooping up the cat’s small frame unasked, and was unbalanced enough by the hooded figure that it didn’t even occur to him to think that the man who blew up the Midgar reactors probably presented a larger existential threat to the cat than whatever was in the kitchen. He felt like a coward, cringing behind the bigger man... but based on the way the rest of the group had reacted – inching closer to one another with hands moving toward weapons – he supposed the unease had affected all of them. 

Outside the house, Barret dropped the cat back on top of its moogle mount and ruffled the dark fur on its head, and without thinking Reeve straightened his hair at the same time Cait Sith adjusted the little crown. 

He trailed behind the rest of the group through the town, trying to stay outside of the buildings as much as possible and keeping the cat’s sensors turned up to full capacity. Something about the hooded figures (present in all the buildings around the square, it seemed) was upsetting in a way that the monsters they encountered in the wild simply weren’t. 

While the rest of AVALANCHE took it in turns entering the buildings, some populated by the cloaked figures and some with locals that didn’t appear to notice anything out of the ordinary, Reeve searched through the Nibleheim file for anything that would explain what they were seeing. 

There was nothing. 

And nothing that gave him reason to anticipate it when one of the figures informed them that Sephiroth was there in the old Shinra mansion. 

“Oh _hell_ ,” Reeve told his kitchen as he slapped the laptop closed, ignoring its beep of protest. He looked at the wall clock. 

It was a little before 3AM. 

He called Heidegger anyway. 

The phone rang through to an answering machine on his first try. He hung up and tried again, punching the buttons with increasing urgency. On the second try, the phone picked up on the fourth ring by a young woman with a pronounced vocal fry. 

“What are you calling so late for?” she asked instead of a greeting, and Reeve found he could imagine her snapping a piece of chewing gum and examining her fingernails. 

“I need to speak with Heidegger,” He answered, fingers tightening on the receiver. 

“He’s busy,” she answered, “What are you, some kind of telemarketer?”

Reeve ground his teeth, cursing internally at his fellow executive’s nighttime proclivities. 

“I’m a coworker. I need him on the phone please.” 

“Can’t you call him on Monday?”

“No, I’m afraid I can’t,” Reeve tried not to yell at the woman. It probably wasn’t her fault that she was in the position of fielding Heidegger’s calls. 

The voice on the other end sighed in a very put-upon manner, and he heard her voice distant from the phone, “Bunny, one of your employees is on the line. He won’t take no for an answer.” 

_Bunny?_ Reeve snorted, and filed that away for later. If the situation was less serious he might have laughed aloud. 

When the head of Public Security finally got to the phone he sounded flustered and breathless. 

“This had better be important. Who is this?”

“It’s Reeve. It is important.”

“Okay. Talk,” some sounds came from the other end of the line that Reeve tried very hard not to identify. 

“We’ve got a report of Sephiroth close by. AVALANCHE is moving now toward the position, apparently in a Shinra property holding in central Nibleheim.” 

“ _That_ fucking place,” Heidegger gave a low whistle, “Look, we send SOLDIER every couple of months to keep it clear of monsters, but it’s best to get them in and out as fast as possible if you can’t stop them going in. Just for fuck sake keep them out of the library.” 

“Library?”

“It shouldn’t be an issue. Just take care of it. I’ll have a team to clear the property within 24 hours, get clear by then or your cover’s gonna be blown.” 

“What about Sephiroth?”

“The Turks place him further north, it’s probably nothing. And if it isn’t, maybe our problems will take care of each other, hey?”

Reeve withheld his opinion about how his brain was linked directly into one of ‘our problems,’ as the man’s obnoxious laugh caused a crackle over the line. Reeve pulled the phone from his ear, making a face.

“Another thing,” he added quickly when it sounded like Heidegger was getting ready to cut the line, “There are these people in robes everywhere. They look sick.” 

“Son of a bitch. Yeah, those things.” 

“You know about them?” Reeve asked, rubbing his face in exasperation. 

“Look, they’re volunteers in an ongoing research project – it’s need-to-know. One of the Turks was supposed to bring you the file on Friday night, didn’t he show up?” 

The tone of his voice suggested that there may or may not have ever been a Turk or a file that was supposed to land in Reeve’s inbox, but it provided enough plausible deniability that it would hard for Reeve to lodge a complaint. Even if the project wasn’t so classified that HR couldn’t get within a hundred feet of it. He held back a noise of annoyance, “Can you tell me now?”

The man laughed again, “Don’t worry about them, they’re harmless – the locals are all fine with them, right?” 

Reeve wondered but said nothing, and Heidegger continued.

“Look, if there’s nothing else, it’s the middle of the god damned night, Reeve. I’ll have someone bring you the files on Monday. Just remember, 24 hours to get out of town – yeah?”

The phone line went dead before Reeve could answer.


	12. Chapter 12

Cait Sith was damaged opening the damn safe. 

With an eye on the clock, Reeve had protested as much as he was plausibly able to against AVALANCHE entering the mansion, citing ideas of private ownership and the Shinra corporation’s problematic feelings about what constituted reasonable force in security protocols.

It had all meant nothing against the chance of finally catching up to Sephiroth, and soon the entire of AVALANCHE was breaking the lock on the massive front doors and walking into the cavernous lobby. 

Even so, things hadn’t been going too badly. Reeve did his best to “accidentally” position the Cait Sith robots in front of anything that looked sensitive, and the group hadn’t spent over-long making their way through the building. He was almost ready to relax when Barret had started flipping through some yellowing files and found a note about safes, and Turks, and hidden rooms in the basement, and suddenly the entire of AVALANCHE had taken off on a children’s scavenger hunt through the unkept building and there hadn’t been a damn thing that Reeve could have reasonably done to stop them. 

And then there was the damn monster in the damn safe.

So Cait Sith had gotten thrown clear of moogle with a single swipe of an orange tentacle. The little cat had smacked into a set of shelves with enough force that its gears made a scream of metal as they were wrenched out of place while in Midgar Reeve had arched his back and screamed – not caring a bit for any neighbours that might have been sleeping like normal people at 3AM. 

The whole thing culminated in Cait Sith (post some hastily applied healing spells, to Reeve’s great relief) being left back at the Inn with Yuffie and Red XIII keeping watch over him in the event that the weirdness of the town turned weirder in a violent kind of way. 

In Midgar, Reeve paced and watched the clock. He figured he could reasonably wait until noon in Nibleheim the following day to get them out of town with a fair window before Shinra’s cleanup crew showed up. Or else... or else what? A confrontation with Shinra? His cover getting blown? Losing his position in the company? All of the above? 

He cursed Heidegger’s vagueness and games.

“Are you okay Cait?” Yuffie asked the robot, drawing Reeve’s attention back to the room in Nibleheim, “You’re not still injured are you? Only you’re acting funny.” 

“Oh, just fine thanks! Sorry to worry you miss Yuffie,” Cait Sith assured her, and bounced atop the moogle – cautiously, in deference to the low ceiling, “I’m more worried about the others. They’ve been gone for such a long time – what if Sephiroth is really in there?” 

And wouldn’t that have solved a whole bunch of his problems in one go, aside from the part where the thought made him feel so sick inside. 

“Aww, they’ll be fine,” Yuffie moved to scratch the little robot behind his ears, and Reeve felt decidedly _un_ reasured by the gesture, “Sephiroth isn’t so tough, or why does he keep running away? They’ll be able to take care of anything that happens in there.” 

Red XIII gave one of his weirdly human nods and added, “I believe in our comrades. And they have the PHS, they will contact us if they encounter a problem. Just as we would contact them.” 

Reeve sighed. It was nearly 7AM in Midgar, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to hurry things along for AVALANCHE. 

He grabbed his car keys and headed for the parking garage. 

\---

Reeve’s car was a beautiful thing. 

It was low, sleek, had cost him nearly as much as his condo, and purred through the streets of the city with a sense of barely contained power that was almost as alive as it was machine. It had spoken to him the first time he laid eyes on it and he’d bought it the same day. Reeve _loved_ his car. 

Taking it onto the open highway toward Kalm and pushing the engine up into its limits almost let him shake off the other self in the back of his mind, anxious and waiting in a distant hotel room. The car was a different thrill from the agility he had learned to coax out of his robot avatar, speeding though the cliffs and valleys of the Cosmo area. The car’s energy was less immediate, less urgent, but grounded in the feeling of the potential under the hood and the blast of wind and sun on his skin as he left Midgar further and further behind. 

He was filling the tank two hours out from the city (“That thing looks like it runs on thousand-gil notes,” his mother had told him when he showed it to her, but she smiled every time he took her out with the top down) when a clatter on the stairs in Nibleheim announced the return of AVALANCHE to the small Inn. 

Aeris was the first through the door, looking tired and grim (a reasonable way to look for someone out fighting monsters to nearly midnight) and had already dropped onto the nearest bed by the time the rest of the group had filed in, tense and exhausted. 

He let himself drift into the cat while the teenager at the service station set the pump to run automatically and began cleaning his windshield. 

“He got past us,” Cloud informed them tersely, “We could barely get near him. He’s strong.” 

“Talked about Jenova again,” Barret supplemented when it became clear that Cloud was done talking, “Something about a Reunion and a Calamity from the Skies.”

“Forget that,” Aeris scolded him, sitting up, “It’s a lot of nonsense anyway. Ancient this and Jenova that. Introduce Vincent, why don’t you?” 

“Oh!” Tifa answered, like shaken out of a reverie. She poked her head back out the doorway and Cait Sith heard her speaking to someone outside, “Come on in, won’t you, and meet everyone? I’m sure we could all use some rest after today.” 

A flash of red fabric and pale features passed quickly in front of the open door, and Reeve knew that the image he was able to form of the person outside owed only to the robot’s AI. A man’s low voice answered Tifa’s call, and Cait Sith’s sensitive sensors that let him understand “I... I’ll just wait outside. It’s... a lot all at once. I’ll keep watch.” 

Tifa made an unhappy noise but didn’t argue, addressing the room instead, “Sephiroth headed up past Mt. Nible. We’ll have to start early tomorrow if we have any chance of keeping up. The innkeeper told me that the road to the reactor hasn’t been maintained, but it’s still the fastest way past the mountains.” 

“You still know your way?” Cloud asked her. 

“I don’t think I’ve forgotten too much,” she nodded at him, then looked at her feet, hands curling into fists. Cloud placed a hand on her shoulder, and she relaxed marginally. 

Reeve was about to have the small robot offer to share the first watch when fuel attendant rapped on his windshield. 

“You okay sir?”

He realized he’d zoned out, and gave the young woman his best smile, “Yes, sorry about that – how much do I owe you?” 

Reeve handed over his charge card and added a generous tip when she brought him the bill to sign, suddenly in a much better mood with the promise of an early start for AVALANCHE the next day. 

He paid only the least attention as the group in Nibleheim settled in for the night, guiding the car back onto the highway and heading back toward Midgar with a lighter foot and a lighter heart. 

With the feeling of immediate pressure off, the blue skies and open land far from the city smog began to feel almost like the world inhabited by his other self, and he felt a pang for the freedom and movement of the AVALANCHE group. 

He shook it off, blaming the feeling on the melancholy of another weekend coming to a close, and before he could examine the idea any further turned into the lot of a roadside stand offering local produce. If it reminded him of the previous night spent on the quiet farm near Nibleheim, he wasn’t about to examine the thought too closely. 

The smell of fall apples and fresh greens was heavy in the air as he stepped out of his car, clicking the locks shut from habit. 

Attracted by the crunch of tires on gravel the shop keeper emerged from inside the small stand, a broad man in his twenties with a deep tan and sun-bleached hair.

They exchanged a polite greeting as Reeve wandered over to peruse the offerings, wondering vaguely what he would even do with three kilograms of peppers if he bought them. 

“You’ve got a real nice car, sir,” the young man whistled, “What can you get out of fifth gear on one of those?”

“Actually, it has six,” Reeve corrected him gently, and couldn’t help being charmed by the way the man looked down and away, colouring slightly at his own mistake. He leaned forward and offered his most winning smile, “You should take a drive with me some time and find out.” 

As the young man’s eyes met his with cautious interest the sound of another car pulling in caused them both to turn, and Reeve forgot all thoughts of the best way to slip the attendant his phone number. 

The car, a serious vehicle with blacked out windows, eased to a halt offensively close to them, forcing Reeve to take a step back as the driver’s door swung open and one of Heidegger’s favourite stooges stepped out. 

“... You didn’t inform Shinra you would be leaving the city.” 

“Rude,” Reeve acknowledged him, trying to keep his voice neutral, “It’s _Sunday_. You were tracking my _car_?”

“... Yes,” the Turk’s expression was nonplussed behind his dark glasses. He held out a thick manilla folder, speaking in front of the young man beside them as it he wasn’t there, “You set off an alarm when you opened the safe. You’ll need this.” 

Reeve flipped it open and saw a photo of the man ( _Vincent_ ) he had glimpsed outside the room of the Nibleheim Inn, “Yes, they’ve recruited him now,” he said, then accused, “You don’t think I could have used this sooner?” 

Rude looked away, and mumbled something to the effect of, “Need to know,” and, “Outside the scope of your department,” before clearing his throat. “Anyway, if you’re done propositioning swarthy farm boys, Heidegger wants you back in Midgar.” 

Reeve spared a glance to the side where the young man had gone red and was quickly making an exit to the back of the stand. 

“I don’t work for Heidegger,” Reeve told him through gritted teeth, clenching the folder until it buckled. 

“In this you do,” Rude answered, and before Reeve could argue further the Turk was back in his car and peeling out of the parking in a spray of gravel. 

Reeve looked down at the file in his hand, then glanced around for the attendant. The young man was nowhere to be seen. He dropped some cash worth several times the value of the peppers he picked up, and after a moment’s hesitation added his business card to the pile – although he figured Rude had effectively slammed the door shut on _that_ going anywhere. 

At least he could drop the produce with his mother as he drove back into town. She always complained he didn’t visit enough. And there was a some satisfaction in the thought of making Heidegger wait for him. 

\---

The group in Nibleheim was back on their feet by eight the next morning and gathering supplies for travel by foot. 

Filial duties fulfilled and parceled off home with a small army’s worth of food to put in his freezer (his mother as ever had been happy to see him, and to tell him that he was too thin; didn’t call often enough; worked too hard; could he go wash the outside windows?; needed to settle down with someone nice; looked tired), Reeve settled in to give the new file his full attention. 

It was, as his cursory glance on by the roadside produce stand had suggested, not particularly informative – large blank blocks of redaction covering anything that might have been helpful. He knew that the man had been a Turk, had been resuscitated and kept in suspended animation following an incident 30 years prior (and wouldn’t that have be a shock for the poor guy waking up), and that he had been involved in some classified experiments that had yielded unexpected and unspecified results (something Reeve could relate to). 

Armed with that information, seeing the man’s careful watchfulness in a secluded corner of the Inn lobby came as no surprise when he piloted the Cait Sith robots down the stairs the next morning. 

“Very good to meet you, Vincent” he said, doing everything to make the little cat as charming as possible, “Did you sleep well?” 

“I... have slept long enough,” the man nodded in acknowledgement, but seemed to shrink further back into the folds of his cloak. His eyes glowed strangely – almost but not quite like those of the SOLDIERS he’d met. Reeve decided that it was better not to press him. 

His assignment regarding the former Turk was to report back anything out of the ordinary, but the larger objectives remained collection of information regarding either Sephiroth or the Aeris (the Ancient, he tried to correct himself, but the cold classification barely meant anything to him any more). Of course, he was also responsible for offering forewarning of any organized attacks against Shinra, but those had been scarce in his tenure with the group.

“You are a robot... robots, am I right?” Vincent asked him, and the little cat puffed up his chest. 

“The cutting edge in robotics and artificial intelligence!” He did a little spin to show off the robot’s agility, and in Midgar Reeve barely even registered the nausea any more, “I tell fortunes too.” 

“Do you?” Vincent asked him, but the question sounded more like amusement than an invitation. The man flexed his claw of a left hand thoughtfully, “Made by Shinra I suppose?” 

“At the forefront of modern innovation!” Cait Sith chirped. 

“Well,” Vincent mused, “Good for them.” 

It didn’t sound like he was particularly happy for them. Before Reeve could have the robot answer, Vincent had brushed past him and was gone out the front of the Inn, barely stopping along the way to ruffle the little cat’s ears. 

As the group was gathering some time later in the town square, weighed down by equipment, rations and healing supplies, Reeve began to feel nervous. It was still early in Nibleheim, and they were well within the timeframe that Heidegger promised him, but something about his interaction with the other department head, and Rude a few hours later, had made him uncomfortable in a way that wasn’t related to the Heidegger’s nighttime proclivities. 

He chalked it up to the feeling of anxious waiting that rippled through the assembled group. 

“Damn shame to leave the buggy,” Cloud mused as he was adjusting the straps on one of his packs, the party just waiting for Yuffie and Aeris to return with the last lot of healing supplies. 

“... You know it’ll never make it past the foothills,” Tifa answered him, but she bit her lower lip after as if it wasn’t quite what she wanted to say. Reeve wondered if his own jitters were making him read too much into things. 

Cait Sith sat on the ground, his moogle loaded up with more water and rations than the group would have been able to carry otherwise. He almost didn’t mind abandoning the bulky, awkward thing, preferring the agility and freedom offered by the little cat – but it did give him a lower vantage point on the tension in the group, the awkward shuffling of feet and toe tapping as they prepared to leave. 

“How long is this gonna take, anyway? Seems like you’ve got us provisioned for a long haul,” Barret lifted his sack in illustration, and the straps strained and the weight of its load although the man didn’t seem to notice. 

“Longer after we get to the passing,” Tifa said and stood beside him, gesturing with her arm to guide his view along their path between two of the peaks, “At least a week to Rocket Town unless we can find a ride on the other side of the mountains. It’s hardest before we get to the reactor, though. If someone gets hurt it’s a long wait for help to arrive. We... lost someone. Back before the fire.”

She dropped her arm, looking distant but continuing, “I don’t know the path to Rocket Town. I’ve never been, just heard from people who made the trip. They would say that most of the path was fine but that Mt Nible was “a real bitch”.”

“Heh,” Barret patter her shoulder with his eyes still fixed on the passing between the two mountains, “Well, we survived those damn stairs at the Shinra building. A real bitch, huh?” 

“If I remember,” Cloud said as the others finally appeared from a nearby shop and Tifa went to help them balance their packs, “You complained every step of the way up.”

“Never gonna apologize for complaining about Shinra,” the big man grinned. 

After his own interactions with the Public Security department over the weekend, Reeve didn’t have it in him to disagree. The irony of Cait Sith’s presence in the group wasn’t lost on him. 

“Well,” Cloud said as the women rejoined them, “Might as well get going.”


	13. Chapter 13

Reeve had found himself becoming increasingly comfortable in the cat’s skin during the time the party was travelling west, itching to leave the powerful but clumsy moogle behind and experience the joy of movement through the nimble Cait Sith robot. Ascending the foothills at the base of Mt Nible had been pleasant, racing between thick trunks of old growth trees and kicking up a spray of leaf litter at the little cat’s passing, sometimes accompanied by Red XIII – although the Cosmo Beast moved more carefully under large saddle packs strapped across his withers. 

While the direct control of the robot through his neural link had required much more active attention and had kept him from falling deeply asleep, he wasn’t able to regret the night he spent running through the woods above Nibleheim as he dragged himself tiredly into the Shinra building the next morning. There was a pleasure in the way that the cat’s easy mechanical movements didn’t slow or tire with time, unlike the rest of AVALANCHE, many of whom were grumbling by the time tents were finally set up in the early twilight. However, a night actively navigating the path toward the Reactor rather than sleeping left Reeve feeling the strain. 

Arriving at his office, he was disappointed but no longer surprised to find nothing from Heidegger in his inboxes, physical or digital, and he rubbed absent-mindedly at the back of his neck where a tension headache had been forming under the pressure of continuously navigating the Cait Sith. As pleasant as the day (night he corrected himself, although the bright sunlight in the early-autumn woods spoke more to him of daytime than the smog outside his office window) had been, it had strained his endurance in a way that all night working on a proposal had never done to him. The headache that had been a background presence for the past few weeks made itself known and left him with a feeling of something inside that was pulled too tight. 

In his office, Reeve stared at his conspicuously empty inbox and thought about a time when that would have considered that a thing to celebrate. 

He left his office to get a coffee, hoping he could run into Heidegger or one of his Turks on the way to prompt them informally for the missing files. 

When he got back to his office later with coffee but no further information about the situation in Nibleheim, he flipped open his planner and saw he had a few hours before a weekly check-in meeting with his top managers. He had prepared for it the evening before, anticipating that he would need the morning to deal with files from Heidegger. 

Reeve sighed over the absent files and left his office a second time, taking the elevator up only to discover that Heidegger wasn’t in his office, either, his secretary informing Reeve that the head of Public Security had never entered the building that morning. 

Reeve tried very hard not to recognize her voice from their weekend phone conversation, and considered his options. Heidegger and the Turks were clearly not offering him solutions. Hojo had still been missing the previous Friday when he’d checked in with the medical team monitoring his neural implants. There was certainly no HR person assigned to mediate information sharing in classified top-level projects. 

He thanked the secretary for her help (although she hardly seemed to notice he was still standing there, and he wasn’t necessarily unhappy about it) and returned to the elevator. Taking matters to the President felt uncomfortably like _telling dad_ , but thinking of the weirdness of his time in Nibleheim and the lack of support or preparation he’d received for it he was past caring. 

When he had first been approached by Heidegger and the late President regarding a possible field assignment deploying cutting edge tech, he’d been so excited that he’d barely stopped to wonder why they had chosen him for the project. Even when he’d been passed off to Hojo, sitting through a series of technical presentations on the installation neural implants that he could barely follow, along with the medical team who would accompany him through the months of surgeries and training with increasingly complex devices and exercises, it had seemed like a natural fit when they highlighted his history in intelligence. 

He was feeling bitter when he arrived at the President’s outer office. 

“Mr. Tuesti!” one of Rufus’s assistants greeted him brightly, a cheerful and competent woman he had always liked when they ran into each other in the building, “What can I do for you today?” 

“I need to see the president,” he told her. He forced a smile for her, trying not to sound as irritated as he felt.

“Ah,” she hesitated, “It would really be better if you made an appointment. I could call your assistant and –”

“Please,” Reeve interrupted her, “It’s about AVALANCHE.” 

Her face paled and he felt briefly guilty. Technically he was telling her the truth, but he was perfectly aware that the more honest “it’s about Heidegger not sharing information about AVALANCHE that under the circumstances I really feel that I’m entitled to” wouldn’t have had the same impact. He briefly wondered at which point the careful half-truths of his dealings as Cait Sith had leaked into his life in the office. 

“Of course,” she answered him, her friendly demeanor melting into strained professionalism, “just give me a moment and I’ll get you buzzed in.” 

After a quick conversation with security she ushered him through the office doors. He climbed to the mezzanine level in time to see Rufus dropping his phone back into its cradle, presumably another of his assistants giving him warning of Reeve’s arrival. 

“Ah, I’m glad you’re here!” the new President stood to greet him, leaning across his father’s oversized desk to shake Reeve’s hand as he approached, “Have a seat, I was going to contact you before the end of the day.” 

“Really?” Reeve asked, briefly hopeful. He’d always had a good relationship with Rufus, he thought, although he remembered him better as the whip-smart teenager unabashedly disrupting the executive offices before finishing his education and being appointed to Junon. 

“Yes!” Rufus assured him, dropping back into a plush executive chair before continuing, “Heidegger tells me you’ve been doing great stuff with the AVALANCHE assignment. And the briefing you sent me about the NeoMidgar project looks fantastic.” 

Reeve tugged fastidiously at his slacks as he sank into one of the ostentatious chairs provided for visitors, “Thank you. Actually, I was coming to see you about the AVALANCHE assignment.” 

Rufus’s face cramped briefly into a frown before he corrected back into an open grin, “Nothing too urgent I hope? Are you still doing alright with the robots? The medical team said you still check out fine, but honestly you’ve looked better.” 

Rufus tapped the space under his eye, prompting Reeve to do touch the same spot on his own face. He’d noticed the dark circles forming beneath his eyes over the past weeks, but had put it out of his mind, trying to convince himself it was a trick of the bathroom lighting when he noticed it in the mornings. 

“I’m... a little tired,” he admitted, “The time difference to Nibleheim is difficult. Actually I wanted to ask you about that. I’ve been having trouble accessing complete information from the Shinra files in time to do any analysis on the spot.”

Rufus did frown at that, “Complete information?” 

“Yes. I keep hitting wall of classified information. I thought I had full clearance for this assignment?” 

“You’re supposed to,” Rufus agreed with him, glancing briefly at a computer screen beside him. Reeve hadn’t noticed him interacting with the machine since he’d arrived, so guessed it was an affectation. He felt a twinge of sympathy for the young man, forced to pick up so many loose ends at once so soon after his father’s passing. 

After a pause, Rufus picked up a pen and jotted a note in his desk planner, “I’ll see what I can do. I’ll have one of my assistants send a reminder down to the archives for a start, and make sure your access is configured properly. It might be an oversight in all the administration reshuffling.” 

“Thank you,” Reeve said, then added, “Do you know why I was chosen for this project? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to send one of the Turks, or a SOLDIER?” 

Although Reeve had been so caught up in the potential of the project to ask questions at the time, faced with the difficulties he was having getting information from the other department heads, he couldn’t help wondering if he shouldn’t have been more curious. 

“I can’t speak to the decisions made by my father before I took control of the company,” Rufus told him, “I can only imagine there was a good reason. I know that Heidegger likes to keep the Turks, ahh, _unencumbered_ by multiple projects. As for the SOLDIERs, well, we don’t pay them to think.” 

Reeve grimaced, “No, I suppose not.” 

“I don’t know what the reason was that you were put on this project Reeve,” Rufus admitted, “So many things around here were never written down anywhere. But you seem like a good choice, to me - your history with the company is exemplary and your experience in the military is relevant to the task. Besides which, there are so few people with clearance for this kind of project...”

Reeve sighed and slumped. He’d used the same tactics often enough to coax overtime out of his own team, but nevertheless found himself mollified by the flattery even while he recognized its instrumental nature.

“Is there anything I should know immediately regarding AVALANCHE?” Rufus prompted him when Reeve didn’t say anything. 

“Well. You may have received the notice already, but Sephiroth was in Nibleheim on Saturday. He took off North around 9PM Midgar Standard Time. We, I mean, I couldn’t keep track of him after that.”

Rufus nodded, “Yes, one of the Turks brought that to my attention at the time. Hmm... you’re really carrying a lot right now, aren’t you Reeve?” 

“Sir?” 

“Managing your department and following AVALANCHE. It’s no good, Reeve, you’re going to burn out.” 

“I’m fine, President,” Reeve lied, even as his headache throbbed like a living thing behind his eyes, “I hope my performance is acceptable...?”

“Fine, Reeve, fine,” Rufus said placatingly, “But you really need to delegate more of the NeoMidgar project. You’ve got a great team there, use them.” 

Reeve had been under the impression that it was precisely what he’d been doing, but before he could think of how to express the thought delicately Rufus continued. 

“Look, you clearly need a break, and I have something I could really use your help with. How about a working vacation?” 

“Working vacation?” Reeve echoed, feeling his eyebrows rise of their own accord. 

“Yeah, let your team shoulder the load for a bit. There’s a contractor the company has a good relationship with – likes to stay in Costa del Sol this time of year. Why don’t you take a week there and get us a good deal on the project?” 

“Contractor? For what project?” 

“NeoMidgar infrastructure. He makes great bridges. And roads and things. Your kind of things. He’d be very impressed if the department head showed up to meet with him personally.” 

Reeve frowned, “We’re still fielding proposals for the NeoMidgar project, I can’t meet with a single contractor –”

Rufus waved his hand dismissively, “You have to understand Reeve, Shinra has a working relationship with this guy’s company. He’s going to do the work. Get us a good deal.” 

“I’m really not sure it’s a good idea for me to leave in the middle of the project. Can’t I send one of my managers to meet with him?”

“No, I’d really like you to go. He’s much more... _your_ type of people.” 

“City planners, sir?”

“Huh? Oh, sure. Anyway, there’s a chopper scheduled to fly you out to Junon on Wednesday night. You’re taking the boat from there, should arrive by late Sunday. Get some sun, Reeve. And some _rest_. You do great work here, we need you in top shape. Take Wednesday off, even, to get ready.”

Reeve left the office feeling both more reassured and more adrift than he had been when he walked in, frustrated to realize that he’d been _handled_ by a man whose voice was still cracking while Reeve was settling in to his first corner office. 

\---

When AVALANCHE set out from Nibleheim the previous day, Reeve had taken the opportunity to observe the newest member of the group. Vincent slipped into the party like a shadow – hovering at the edges, somehow dodging attention in spite of his odd dress and the novelty of having him there. Unlike the rest of the party, aside perhaps from the former SOLDIER and Cait Sith’s cheerfully bouncing moogle, he didn’t show the strain of their unrelenting forward movement.

When they broke camp the following morning, around the same time that Reeve was negotiating with his neighbor’s kid to water the plants while he was away, it was nearly as if Vincent had always been there, a quiet presence at the edges of the group. 

Later in the day (deep in the night in Midgar, while Reeve was digging in his sock drawer to find his passport) Vincent had already forged ahead, scouting for rockslides and easier paths around where the old roads had collapsed or washed out from lack of care. 

“How much further before this flattens out?” Yuffie finally asked in the middle of the afternoon, puffing and sweating after scaling down and up the other side of a rift where a bridge had once stood. Cait Sith was already safely across, and in his sleepless daze Reeve took in the progress of the rest of the team, slowly dragging themselves up to the ledge where the path resumed. 

“Shorter if we cut through the caves,” Tifa answered, dropping her bag and sitting on top of it as she caught up with Yuffie on a clear section of path. She took a long drink of water before continuing, “It’s safer than in the open to stop for the night too, but we’ll probably have to clear out some heavy monsters first.” 

“Fine by me,” Yuffie flopped down next to her, laying flat on the trail and only briefly grimacing at the rocky path, “I’m so sick of _up_.” 

“You’re telling me,” Barret agreed, breathing heavily as he dropped down beside her. 

“What’s the matter Barret, not doing enough cardio?” Cloud’s voice came from below their line of sight. From early in the day he’d stayed in the rear watching that no one fell behind. 

Barret snorted and said, “Maybe I’ll just take a Mako bath and not have to worry about it anymore, hey SOLDIER boy?” 

Tifa hushed him half-heartedly. Reeve was beginning to understand that what squabbling there was among members of the party largely followed a script and lacked any kind of actual vitriol. 

Aeris appeared in view next, her ungloved hands sensitive to the shale at the lip of the fissure. She was boosted all at once with a surprised “Oh!” as Red XIII gave her the final push up and followed her onto the path. 

Aeris patted his nose in gratitude and he grumbled, but looked pleased. 

A moment later Cloud was with them. He grabbed Yuffie’s pack where she’d left it at the side of the trail and slung it over the shoulder not carrying his massive sword, then helped her to her feet and gestured with his chin it was time for the group to get moving. 

Cait Sith looked in the direction Cloud had gestured to see Vincent hovering in their path, and wondered if his sudden appearance had startled anyone else. 

If it had, no one had the extra energy to show it. 

“There’s a cave half a kilometer ahead that seems secure.”

“Thanks,” Cloud called to him from the back of the group, as they gradually fell in step behind the former Turk. 

The implication of an approaching rest carried through the tired travelers and sent them moving with more enthusiasm toward the caves, as conversations turned to whether they had made enough progress to make a camp for the night. The consensus seemed to be positive, bodies aching from the intense climb and no one willing to be over tired in the event of a creature attack. 

In Midgar, Reeve settled into his living room with low lights and a cool pack across his forehead, equally eager for even a short pause in the need to navigate the little Cait Sith robot manually. The second sleepless night – even unburdened as he was after assigning the next week’s NeoMidgar work to his managers – was taking its toll and his head and stomach rebelled at the strain. Still, he didn’t dare admit that it had been a mistake to let the moogle carry supplies instead of its usual passenger, the implications that the machine’s stamina had arbitrary limits risked raising too many questions. 

“Here,” Vincent called back to them not long after, and ducked into a cave mouth that had been nearly invisible until they rounded a pile of rubble from an old rockslide. 

“Do you remember this?” Aeris asked Tifa, eyeing the entrance – and possibly the man who had pointed it out.

Tifa sighed, “Maybe? It says something to me, but it’s been five years, and the trail isn’t as clear as it was. Most of the caves are safe. At least, I’ve never heard of anyone getting trapped.”

“It’s possible the people who were trapped never made it out to tell anyone,” Red XIII added with the timing of comedy, but in his deep growl it was hard to tell. 

Barret snorted, “You’re a ray of sunshine today, hey, Red?” but he ruffled the beast’s mane as they stopped next to each other, taking any sting out of the words. 

Inside the cave, Tifa stopped abruptly, voicing a soft, “Oh.” 

The followed in behind her as she looked around the oddly glowing cavern, “Oh, this is...” 

“The Mako fountain,” Cloud finished for her, the last into the cavern. 

“I... yes,” she agreed, though her voice was tight. 

She walked ahead of the group to a broad stalagmite sitting beneath a trickle of glowing energy. From his vantage near the ground, Reeve saw the way she had rolled up onto the balls of her feet, clearly involved with some inner fight-or-flight response to something that the rest of them couldn’t see. 

“It’s almost dry now,” Cloud observed. 

“... Yes.” Tifa said, and approached the edge of the fountain. Aeris followed half a step behind her, and placed a hand on her shoulder. 

Vincent cleared his throat softly from one corner of the cavern, “I looked around, there don’t seem to be any creatures in this area to be concerned over.” 

“Thank you,” Aeris nodded to him, before turning her attention back to Tifa, “This is the place you told us about, back in Kalm?”

Tifa nodded, “I was so happy when we found it, it was so beautiful. I didn’t know –”

Her voice broke off, and Aeris squeezed her shoulder, “You couldn’t know what was about to happen.” 

The group shuffled, Reeve saw through the little cat’s eyes, like no one was quite sure how to approach or what to say. He’d seen her file though and supposed at least some of the party must be aware that her last trip up the mountain had resulted in her father’s death, and what Shinra vaguely referred to as the “Sephiroth Incident.”

When the shuffling stretched into painful silence, Reeve pushed the Cait Sith robot forward on impulse. In spite of himself he’d found himself becoming fond of Tifa over the past weeks – still the only member of AVALANCHE without any special augmentation, any special training, anything that would have prepared her for the loss she suffered as a teenager, or any way to deal with it. 

The little cat’s body slipped easily through the milling feet as he took a place next to the young woman, and reached up to bump her hand with a paw before he thought better of it. 

She looked down at him with a frown, but Reeve didn’t feel it was directed at him as much as she was trying very hard to keep something bitter inside. 

“Will you be okay, Miss Tifa?” he asked her, and her face twisted a little more. 

“Oh _Cait_ ,” she murmured, then scooped him into her arms and hugged him like the teddy bear that he was designed to resemble. 

The woman was _strong_ Reeve marveled as the woman held onto him with rib-aching intensity. He knew the robot was at least thirty kilograms, even as she lifted it like it weighed nothing. After a moment, Aeris wrapped her arms around both of them and Barret placed his big hand on Tifa’s shoulder in solidarity. 

As much as he’d tried to avoid petting from his teammates, feeling more like a creep each time someone tickled his chin, he couldn’t regret letting the young woman use the little avatar for comfort. Not when the tremors in her arms gradually calmed, and her stance loosened. He wrapped the little cat’s arms around her as tightly as he dared, hardly noticing the oddness of being lifted and held like a toy. 

When she placed him back on the ground a few minute later, more composed and starting to organize the rest of the group into setting up camp, Reeve still felt the warmth of being held by his teammates, glowing that he could do something to help his friend when she was suffering. 

It didn’t occur to him until later to worry he was getting too involved.


	14. Chapter 14

At first Barret had pushed to destroy the Nibel reactor while they were there, furious with the installation and the clear damage it was doing to the surrounding landscape. 

To Reeve’s immense relief, Cloud and Aeris had talked him down before Cait Sith needed to get involved, observing that while the reactor was bizarrely unsupervised and made an easy target – especially in light of the story Cloud had shared regarding its use as a research facility – there was no telling the kind of attention they would attract by attacking it. 

Aeris had also commented on the risk that Nibelheim and Rocket Town risked being left in the same state as Gongaga, located as they were on the far side of the world and without the pressure of accountability that the Midgar population would provide. 

A month before, Reeve would have been horrified by the suggestion. 

Sitting in his office in the middle of another sleepless night at the Shinra building he was just grateful not to have to find out if she was right, and he was glad to finally pass between the mountains and leave the reactor behind to begin the – much easier – decent toward the plains surrounding Rocket Town. 

He’d spent his last day in Midgar organizing his department for his absence, appreciative that even if his fellow department heads were a study of egos and personality deficits, at least the people working under him were in fact as excellent as Rufus had suggested the previous morning. When the business day had ended, however, he’d been unable to face the thought of making the trip home and had fallen into an exhausted sleep on his office sofa, barely taking the time to kick off his shoes. 

When AVALANCHE began stirring a few hours later and he’d been obligated to reassume control of the robot cat he’d faced a struggle into wakefulness, nowhere near rested enough if no longer asleep on his feet. He stretched out a kink in his back and gave the sofa cushions a judicious few thumps before laying back with his arms behind his head, eyes dropping closed as he directed his concentration navigating of the cat. 

It nearing the end of the day and most of the way through their decent when things really went pear shaped. Later, Reeve wouldn’t be able to decide if it had been a false sense of security from the easier course of the trails, or his own exhaustion that had left him oblivious to some sign of trouble. 

Cait Sith was at the front of the group with Red XIII, scouting to ensure the route was clear of debris and monsters, when something lurched under the little robot’s paws. Neither the man nor the AI had enough time to bring the robot to a halt before the ground beneath it crumbled and fell out in a crash of eroded gravel. 

The ground had already disappeared beneath him before he noticed to shout, tumbling and twisting along where the road had washed out from underneath. The cat spun down, down, down in a cascade of little hurts, banging and spinning and arriving at the bottom totally disoriented. 

In Midgar Reeve sat upright and grabbed wildly at his surroundings while his consciousness pinwheeled down in a cascade of loose rocks, trying to make sense of where he had ended up from the confused input of a world that spun frenetically between brilliant sunlight overhead and a field of loose fill as the robot’s sensors were attacked by contrasting information. 

He distantly heard his own voice shouting, not fully sure if his alarm was being voiced in his office or through the cat in the mountains. 

After unbearably long seconds of chaos the robot came to a rest at the bottom of the washout with a solid _thump_ and whine of protesting gears, his attempt to find purchase with Cait Sith’s little paws frustrated until the robot’s decent had already come to a stop.

“Cait!” someone was yelling from the top of the slope. Reeve couldn’t immediately identify the person shouting, still trying to find his feet and grab for stability as his panic caught up with his perception, the world still spinning in his mind. 

As he finally reoriented himself, he saw that he was sitting in a dry streambed, the ground around him made up of eroded sediment. It was obviously a new track for water that had developed either as a byproduct of the roads and development in the mountains, or else something placed intentionally by the builders to keep the seasonal waters from damaging the infrastructure. 

He was some thirty meters from where he started, looking up a steep embankment to where Red XIII’s worried expression peered over the edge of the collapsed road. From beneath, Reeve could see where time and lack of maintenance had begin chipping away at the mountain path from the bottom. 

Red XIII’s big paws shifting at the edge of the drop off caused more rubble to dislodge, causing a patter of rock on rock that turned into a series of tiny slides by the time they reached the bottom where Cait Sith laid, still half buried himself. 

“Are you alright?” the beast called to him, and Reeve considered. 

None of the alerts he would expect from critical damage were nagging for his attention. As he was pulling the little cat out of the rubble, however, a crackle of energy from a dozen tiny injuries made itself known. It sent the little cat’s fur standing on end and a sympathetic shiver of nerves across Reeve where he sat in his office. 

“Just shaken up, mostly. The roads are in bad shape from underneath, you’d better stick to the center,” Cait Sith answered, leaning into the slope and starting to climb. The loose rocks gave way under his feet, sliding him back to the base of the slope. 

“I’ll get more help,” Red XIII told him when it became clear that the robot wouldn’t be able to ascend through the loose substrate, and disappeared from view. 

After a few more halfhearted attempts to make it to the trail, Reeve gave up and let the robot drop onto the ground and wait. 

None of the damage to his avatar was particularly serious, although one of the back legs was badly twisted. He expected that a painful but brief twist back to alignment from one of his teammates would put it right again, with a judicious application of healing spells. 

Reeve reached under his shirt and withdrew a pendant equipped with cure-all materia. He’d started carrying it after the first time the robots had been injured by the Grand Horn just south of the Gold Saucer. An insurance policy in case things got desperate, although he wasn’t sure if magic cast on him in Midgar would run to the robots as it had run in the other direction. He hadn’t had a chance to find out, concerned to reveal himself outside of desperate circumstances. At the same time he’d acquired the pendant he’d made sure that the little cat had the same equipment slotted into its megaphone, but in his exhaustion he’d left the prop with the moogle when the group had set out in the morning. 

Reeve sighed, and the little cat mimicked his motion in pantomime. 

He was contemplating whether to move further ahead on the trail to find a place it would be easier to climb up when the robot’s sensitive microphones picked up movement in the surrounding brush. 

“Oh _hell_ ,” Reeve said with the cat, as a large Kyuvilduns slunk from its cover under some low bushes. The bright green of its scales had been surprisingly effective camouflage, leading him not to notice it until crept toward him with reptilian menace, occasionally lifting its head to wave its long proboscis, scenting the air. 

Reeve stood the robot up to face it, but without the moogle or the rest of the team around him, the thing seemed impossibly big, baleful red eyes at a level with Cait Sith’s as it considered him. 

“Go away,” he told it, “I’m made of metal, you can’t eat me.” 

It scratched at the ground with one of its spiked forelegs and paced side to side, examining the cat from different angles. Reeve didn’t know if he could fight it without the help of the moogle. The cat was fast, _probably_ even fast on its injured leg, but it was built for stealth over brute force. 

When the creature didn’t get any closer, Reeve used the Cait Sith to make shooing motions at it, kicking some rocks with his good leg. 

The Kyuvilduns dropped its head as a spray of pebbles showered it, and made a noise like a shrill growl, backing away and turning. 

Before Reeve could decide whether to chase it fully away while he had an advantage, a series loud gunshots sounded from above. 

The Kyuvilduns’ head exploded outward in a spray of red, its body dropping to the ground even as bloody rocks bounced up from the bullet’s trajectory. 

Cait Sith’s chipper voice cried out first in shock, then again in horror as pieces of the thing splattered against the cat’s white belly. 

He swung his head around and up to see Vincent standing at the edge of the trail above him, smoke still coiling from the barrel of his Peacemaker. 

“They hunt in packs,” Vincent said calmly, “To your right.” 

Reeve directed the cat’s sensors where Vincent had indicated, and saw the brush flattened around the collapsed corpses of more of the creatures, hidden out of sight as he addressed the first one. His stomach roiled in a way unrelated to the residual motion sickness of his tumble. 

He didn’t have time to contemplate the implication too deeply however, as Barret came into view beside the Turk and a moment later was skidding in a controlled slide down the side of the embankment in a fresh batch of loose debris. 

He came to a stop a few feet away from where Cait Sith had retreated due to the new wave of displaced pebbles.

“You’re a damn mess again, cat,” Barret told him, without any sting. As soon as he found his footing in the streambed he was spinning a bangle around to find the desired materia, and a moment after that the robot and the man in Midgar were enveloped in blue light. 

Reeve cried out at the feeling of his leg twisting around even as he sat motionless and untouched in his Shinra office, but as the light faded the dozen little injuries did also, replaced by a feeling of calm wellbeing. He let out a sigh of relief, rubbing at the phantom pain in his leg. 

“When did you start carrying cure-all?” Cait Sith asked, and Barret gave him a look that Reeve couldn’t read. 

“After the first time you got hurt near Gongaga,” Barret started brushing debris away from the cat’s fur, tugging him back and forth to check him on all sides like a fussing parent, “We all did.” 

“Oh,” Reeve said with the cat, offering no resistance as Barret grabbed and spun his little avatar, barely registering how the fussing mapped out through the neural link, “I... oh. Thank you.” 

“‘S nothin’,” Barret mumbled, “‘S what we do for our own.”

_Our own_. 

Barret produced a rag from somewhere and began wiping the gore from the cat’s white chest fur at the same time that the end of a thick rope landed heavily beside them. 

“All clear down there?” Cloud called out. 

“He’s fine,” Barret shouted back, then turned to Cait Sith, “You are fine, right?” 

Reeve had the little cat nod, not having found any indication to the contrary. 

“Good,” Barret answered, tucking the soiled rag into an outer pocket, then held out his hand, “C’mon I’ll give you a lift.”

“I...” he hesitated, feeling oddly warm where Barret had been cleaning off his little avatar. He tried to think of a way to refuse that had to do with the cat and not the awkwardly reluctant Shinra executive sitting in a dark office on the other side of the planet. He finally brushed one of the cat’s paws against the dark stained fur on its chest before echoing the other man’s earlier sentiment, “I’m a mess. I can do it myself.”

The big man shrugged, “Been covered in worse. Just take the help, cat.” 

Without waiting for a response, Barret scooped the robot easily from the streambed and cradled it above the graft of his gun arm, wrapping the rope a few times around his good hand and beginning to climb up the loose stone of the embankment with the help of the team above them. 

Still fuzzy from the tumble, Reeve wrapped the cat’s arms around Barret’s neck without thinking. Possibly from lack of sleep, possibly from the lingering glow of the healing spell, the feeling of being carried didn’t register as odd in the way it had the last times Barret had picked up the robot.

It took only a few moments to reach the top of the embankment, the inaccessible distance for the damaged robot short work for a grown man. Cloud and Tifa grabbed Barret as the approached the top of the slope and helped him up the last few feet onto the old road. 

Cait Sith was barely on his own feet a moment before he was being scooped up again by Tifa and Aeris, examined and petted as if he was actually a cat. Reeve felt disoriented all over again, brushing at his own hair and ears as they checked him over. 

“It’s fine, I’m fine,” he insisted, trying to twist the cat loose from Tifa’s hold without harming either of the young women. 

Red XIII had approached from beside them, “Cait, I need to apologize for not coming to your aid more quickly. I didn’t realize you were injured.” 

“I really am fine,” he insisted again, successfully freeing himself from the women and dropping onto the road to answer the Cosmo Beast face to face. 

Red XIII made a deep rumbling noise, his head drooping dejectedly to stare at his big paws in a strangely childlike gesture. 

Cloud cleared his throat, “We all okay to get going now?” 

In Midgar Reeve huffed in relief, speaking through the cat, “I’m ready to go.” 

Cloud nodded and took the lead down the trail, carefully staying in the center of the path. After a time, Vincent and Red XIII slipped off ahead of the group, testing the roads again. 

Reeve watched them go with a pang, but when they didn’t look back for him felt guilty relief to keep pace with the main group, trotting between their feet and close to the powerful moogle where it trailed the main group. 

In Midgar, Reeve pulled on his shoes and jacket and made his way down to the building’s parking garage. In the small hours of the morning, he only passed security guards as he made his way out, nodding to the few faces he recognized on the way. 

When he arrived home, around the same time the crumbling mountain trail turned into flat ground and AVALANCHE started setting up camp for the night, he dropped onto his bed and didn’t wake up until his alarm sounded to go meet the helicopter for Junon.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Minor warning this chapter for worse than usual Hojo-related horribleness toward the end.

Just past sunset Reeve was corralled from the helicopter to one of the Junon navy ships, a beast of a thing preparing to set sail shortly before midnight to catch the high tide. A small team of infantrymen carried his gear and led him to the port, and the briny smell of the ocean soaking into everything against a background of waves breaking on the city structure built into the seawall. 

Still disoriented from Cait Sith’s injury the previous day and weighed down by the heavy feeling of sleeping the day away after too many hours awake, Reeve declined an invitation to tour Junon before departure. He boarded the ship and began settling into his cabin, a utilitarian space below deck. 

His timing aligned abnormally well with the start of day in his other life, the team stowing camping gear and preparing to set off. Cait Sith slunk into the pile of supplies still tied atop the moogle. His teammates were tactful enough to say nothing about it, and he suppose if asked he could explain that the load was lighter after days of travel and could tolerate the cat’s presence without straining the mechanism. It wouldn’t even be a lie. 

With the little cat tucked cozily into the piles of tents and rations Reeve found himself nodding off on the little bunk in his cabin in spite of the day spent sleeping, and soon the bright day in the foothills receded into a vivid dream.

\---

He rose disoriented out of sleep in the late afternoon, a cozy cat in the sunshine below the Nibel mountain range and a man unglued from time in the dark of his windowless ship cabin. The rocking of the ship was not entirely unlike the gait of the big moogle he’d become accustomed to over the previous weeks. 

Mind still in a syrupy half-doze, his consciousness looped through the previous day; tumbling down the embankment, the red eyes of the monster, Barret carrying him to safety. In his dream he was the man – a tiny and vulnerable version of his human self, dwarfed by regular sized members of AVALANCHE and filled with an anxious feeling of exposure as he waited for them notice he was no longer the cat. 

The feeling of being cradled and carried resolved itself into an awareness of someone’s bedroll bracketing the cat’s back where it was curled in the supplies atop the moogle. 

Reeve directed the robot to sit upright, scanning the area with a sudden fear that the people around him had been privy to the contents of his dream, but the team walked on oblivious ahead of him. The moogle trailed them as it had done for days, the onboard AI managing the task of following the group without needing supervision. 

Relieved, Reeve yawned and stretched in his cabin, shuffling to his feet and looking for the lights as the ship moved gently around him. His linked avatar mimicked his stretch with a cartoonishly exaggerated programmed routine, and settled on its haunches to better orient itself. 

“Finally up?”

Cait Sith’s gazed followed the voice and saw Barret slowing down to walk beside the big moogle. Directing his attention forward he realized that the group had been keeping a closer eye on him than he’d realized, one or another of them shooting backward glances every few moments. It gave him the strange impression that they were shaken by the little robot’s mishap the same way Reeve was. 

He gave an exaggerated nod as Barret fell into step next to him. 

“You ok? Haven’t tried to tell anyone’s fortune since the monsters yesterday.” 

In truth it had been quite a while longer than that, the robots’ story from the Gold Saucer falling further behind the longer they travelled, but he supposed it was a sign of normalcy that he could have done a better job of maintaining. 

“Fine, fine. Just in sleep mode,” he had the cat give an exaggerated yawn and blink its eyes owlishly for effect before returning the cat’s face to its resting expression, eyes slanting closed to mask the cameras that sat where a real cat’s pupils would have been. 

“Sometime forget you’re a robot,” Barret frowned, then shrugged. 

Reeve wonder if he’d pushed the fact of his mechanical body too hard, the feeling of exposure from his dream prickling up the back of his neck. 

The thought passed quickly as Barret gave the moogle a few solid pats, and Reeve was simultaneously dismayed that he was being confused with the simple machine beneath him and grateful not to deal with his teammates’ petting so soon after waking up. That he’d just woken half convinced that the man walking next to him was still carrying him up the side of the embankment as he had the previous day didn’t lessen his unease. 

“Robots have feelings too you know,” he chided, wrapping the cat’s tail neatly over its forepaws in one of the many gestures the programmers had created to keep the machine’s presence convincingly organic. 

“Oh yeah?” Barret asked. His mouth twitched into a quick smile, but he didn’t say anything further. 

Reeve too stayed silent as AVALANCHE carried on along the old roads leading down to the plains. 

\---

By the time Cloud called a halt for the night all of AVALANCHE had found their way over to the robots at some point or other, patting the moogle or stretching to tickle the little cat’s ears. Even Vincent had patted Cait Sith’s head a few awkward times before the end of the day, his motions stilted like someone who had seen it done on television but had never fully understood the purpose. 

Over the same stretch, Reeve emerged from his cabin below deck and gone in search of something to eat after sleeping the clock around. A tour of the ship uncovered both that the mess was well stocked with prepared meals for the night shift, and that the ship’s fax machine was out of order (the overnight logistics officer had been deeply apologetic but ultimately unhelpful in this regard). 

By the time AVALANCHE was setting up camp for the night Reeve was watching the sunrise from the deck of the ship, wondering how the hell he was supposed to get any administrative work done with only his satellite phone and the documents he had brought with him. 

Seating himself on a crate and fixing his eyes on the early morning light at the horizon, he let him mind wander to occupy the cat. 

It was later than they had been stopping the previous days, the going easier as the trails flattened out and the party more used to the long stretches of hiking, but there was still some margin before nightfall to set up tents and start a small campfire. Cait Sith shuffled back and forth atop the moogle as camping gear was retrieved and small affectionate touches were showered on the cat. 

By the time Yuffie had found an excuse to make her way over and scratch under his chin for the third time with an expression of vague worry, Reeve was nearly ready to crawl out of his skin. 

As she was pulling her hand away he reached out with the little cat’s paws and grabbed it, making her pause. 

He shook her hand as formally as he dared in the little cat’s persona, “I promise I’m okay Miss Yuffie, you can stop worrying.” 

“I’m not worried!” Yuffie protested automatically, then looked at her feet embarrassed, “It’s just... it was scary seeing you in trouble, and you’ve hardly said anything since.” 

Reeve cursed internally, realizing that she wasn’t wrong. It was all well and good that he made himself feel better by retreating to the safe space afforded by the moogle while catching upon his sleep, but he’d fostered certain expectations of the robots that weren’t being met while he was doing it. 

“Just running diagnostics,” he lied, “I’ll be back to myself in no time, just wait and see!” 

Yuffie frowned, and thinking of his conversation with Barret earlier in the day he offered to tell her fortune. It was enough that she made an excuse to slip away back to her campsite. 

Reeve smiled, thinking it was a shame he didn’t get to tell her about her lucky materia colours. He thought it was a quite good one, as fortunes went. 

Instead, he directed his attention to where Barret was preparing the campfire, shuffling the logs in different formations before Tifa finally shooed him and resolved the issue with a fire spell. As the flames leapt immediately and brightly to life, it added a golden glow to his teammates – Tifa, who for all she lacked the special qualifications of the rest of the team was proving to be absolutely indispensable, and Barret who... was not nearly so violent or volatile as Reeve had been warned to expect. 

He thought of the previous day, Barret running ahead of the team to retrieve the Cait Sith robot where it had fallen and fussing over it like a worried parent. 

Not what he’d been led to expect at all. 

As if noticing being watched, Barret called out, “Hey, Cait, come on over here. Nothing to worry about right now... You too, Vincent.” 

The second part was addressed to a point over the cat’s shoulder, and he turned to see the silent man hovering uncertainly a few meters back, hugging the treeline. 

Reeve offered the former Turk one of the robot’s exaggerated shrugs and hopped off the moogle, scampering nearer to the campfire where the AVALANCHE members were slowly gathering as they finished setting up their tents. After a moment Vincent was beside him, crouching on his heels whereas the rest of the team sat more casually, but still more relaxed than he had been since Nibelheim.

As more of the group began to crowd around the small fire, Reeve felt the ever-alarming sensation of his little avatar being scooped up unexpectedly, and realized he was being dragged into Barret’s lap. 

It made sense of course, Reeve tried to tell himself as he froze, snapping briefly back to the deck of the ship in his surprise. The team was getting larger and the robot was small... and also a cat. Making it approachable and sympathetic had been the entire point of the design; that people wanted to treat it like a cute small animal meant it was doing its job. 

It was also damn weird for the man on the other end of the connection. 

He tried to think of the last time he had been sat in someone’s lap and drew a blank. In childhood he supposed. Reaching solidly over six foot before the end of secondary school had very much precluded the activity even as horseplay with his peers or in the few short relationships of his twenties. 

Even through the distance of the neural link, it was far more intimate than he had been prepared for. On the deck of the ship he coughed and glanced around, but saw he had the deck to himself aside from the few crew members with jobs to do at the early hour. He pushed down his embarrassment and slid back into the cat’s awareness. 

If any of the other members of AVALANCHE had noticed his discomfiture, there was no indication. Barret’s hand dropped onto the robot’s back, solid and steadfast. And while Reeve choked, the robot (to his good fortune or not) had no synonymous response programed and offered no reaction. 

It took an effort of will to follow the conversation around the campfire, where Tifa had drawn Vincent into conversation. It was clearly regarding his time in the old Shinra property, as he heard Hojo’s name float past more than once before he caught the stream of conversation. 

After a pause in which Vincent traced out lines in the dirt with a clawed finger of his left arm, Tifa asked him, “Those other bodies, in the basement...?”

“Starvation,” Vincent answered her, looking grim and distant, “Hojo locked the door and walked away at the end of the project. I knew them, but... whatever he did to me was different. I didn’t succumb with the others.” 

“My God,” Tifa went pale, drawing back in spite of herself before recovering. A similar ripple went through the rest of the group. Almost of their own accord Cait Sith’s little paws curled into the fabric of Barret’s pants, and the man’s big hand dropped gently onto his back in response. 

He had never doubted that Hojo was a bit of a bastard, but there had been no indication, no reason to believe the man could be so callous. Reeve pressed a hand to the side of his head and his stomach rolled sickly. 

Vincent waved his still-human hand dismissively, but his shoulders stayed bunched, “It was a long time ago, I think. The first months were much worse. The smell... it was almost a relief when the insects came.” 

When she only stared at him Vincent pulled his cloak tighter around himself and stood, backing away, “I’ve said too much. I apologize.” 

He melted away into the surrounding forest in the shocked silence that followed. The people left at the fire only catalyzed back into motion when a few moments later gunshots rang out from the woods. 

“Monsters!” Vincent’s shout came from the darkness, followed by the howl of a creature. 

As quickly as he had disappeared into the woods the man was back with the group, sliding a fresh round into his revolver as blood dripped from a gash in his upper arm, “They’re attracted by the fire, at least three of them.” 

One of the monsters in question followed him half a moment later, but Reeve didn’t stop to look at it, already halfway back to the moogle. 

“What the hell?” Yuffie yelled somewhere behind him, “It’s wearing _clothes_?!”

It was, Reeve saw through the robot’s perspective, even as he was balancing Cait Sith on his mount and grabbing at the megaphone to give it directions. 

The thing, a gruesome purple beast with elongated jaws and the wings of a bat, was unlike anything Reeve had seen in his monster files. And just as Yuffie had observed, it was wearing a man’s clothing. 

The first one dropped onto Vincent as a second charged from the woods, howling and slashing. 

“Do they look like the monsters from the reactor?” Cloud shouted in the space between Barret’s machine gun fire, darting in with his sword to fling the first of the creatures away from Vincent in the pause. 

“Could be!” Tifa shouted back, hesitating for a space to move in as Barret directed fire at a beast that slunk between the trees as the edge of camp and gnashed its teeth at them. 

Freed from beneath the first creature, Vincent was shaking and struggling to his feet. Cait Sith prepared to cast a cure spell on him then realized he didn’t seem to be struggling from any visible injury. Before he could reassess the situation, the man’s red eyes dropped closed under a heavy frown before reopening a brilliant yellow. He seemed to be getting... _bigger_. 

Then, everything went to hell.


	16. Chapter 16

After the pack of creatures had been driven back into the woods the fire had been quickly doused and the group packed back up, moving several more kilometers in the dark before setting up camp again. Shy of making a fire, they tucked into cold rations and set up their gear with much less enthusiasm than they had earlier in the evening. 

Vincent was... himself again, as near as they all could tell, his stilted apologies and vague confusion as to what had actually happened after his monstrous transformation accepted at face value but doing little to reassure the assembled members of AVALANCHE. To his credit, the creature he became had seemed sufficiently aware of its circumstances to do no harm to any but the monsters attacking them. However, the lack of control or recollection added to the unease around the campsite that evening. 

The positive side, as far as Reeve was concerned, was that the team had stopped fussing over Cait Sith in favour of fussing over Vincent – to Reeve’s immeasurable relief and Vincent’s obvious discomfiture. After the third check-in the former Turk visibly shrank further inside of his cloak each time another teammate approached him, and Reeve could empathize – his own fear of exposure each time the Cait Sith became the center of attention a constant prickle at the back of his mind. 

From the files he’d seen on the man, Reeve was unsure what to think. Vincent’s account of his history seemed at face value to match what Reeve already knew from the Shinra files, although recounted in more horrifyingly vivid detail. He just wished he’d been able to get a more complete file from the archive before leaving Midgar. 

Stranded as he was in the middle of the ocean with no way of sending or receiving information, he was reliant on his satellite phone and the files already on his laptop to make any judgements about appropriate steps. He’d attempted to call in the transformation to Heidegger and found himself routed to speak with Tseng instead, the man making short hmms and small noises of assent in answer to Reeve’s alarm, and promising to pass the information upward before cutting the line. 

Reeve was really starting to hate the Department of Public Security. 

At the campsite on the Rocket Plains, Cait Sith offered to take first watch, and Cloud joined him, the man’s intense Mako eyes flicking back and forth across the treeline with an intensity that Reeve found unsettling. In the limited moonlight, the former SOLDIER’s luminous gaze was nearly as unnerving as the monsters they were watching for. 

After a few hours of silence (Cloud not much for conversation and Reeve just as happy for the break as he dug into what little work he could accomplish while out of touch with the office) Aeris appeared from one of the tents and shooed Cloud away to get some sleep. She petted the little cat briefly after he declined a replacement for the remainder of the night, then leaned against the plush moogle to gaze out into the darkness. 

\---

The cat’s internal clock indicated that they were getting a later start than usual in the morning, the team collecting themselves slowly – sore and sullen after their interrupted night and moods not improved by a cold breakfast. 

Reeve himself had fallen into a nap in the timelessness below the deck of the ship, rocked by the ocean, and only stirred with the rest of AVALANCHE when the cat’s AI alerted him to people emerging from their tents. 

As near as Reeve could tell, Vincent had slept more deeply than he had since joining them days before. But when he slunk out into the morning sunlight he still looked shaken, with deep circles visible beneath his eyes even in the early light. 

Noticing Vincent emerge, Aeris leaned across the moogle to pet Cait Sith’s head a few times (Reeve hardly cringing any more, although he still rubbed at the corresponding spot to fight off the dissonance) before wandering across the campsite to help him where he had begun breaking down his tent rather than joining the group. Reeve considered finding an excuse to keep her from it, but knew from their time traveling together that trying to hold the young woman back from compassion would be like asking a fish not to swim. 

He was however gratified to notice that he was not alone in the group in keeping a close eye on their interactions, as Tifa and Red XIII wandered over to where he was keeping watch. Barret and Yuffie following not long after, the teenager still working her way through a tin of cold beans with an expression like it had personally offended her. 

“Anything unusual overnight?” Tifa asked Cait Sith after morning greetings had been made. 

“Nothing big,” the robot answered, “A few monsters that scanned at low levels, but nothing that seemed interested in a group this size. I did recognize some of them in my database.” 

Tifa frowned at the last part, and exchanged a short nod with Barret that gave the impression of following up on some conversation that Reeve had not been a party to. 

“I think it’s getting worse,” Tifa said, “I remember there were some monsters around when I was a kid, but never like this. They’d mostly leave you alone, too, unless you got too far into their territory. My parents never worried to let us go camping alone.” 

“Used to go camping too sometimes, in Corel. Never had any problem there either,” Barret agreed, then smiled, “Hehe, Myrna and I used to go up into the mountains back when we still lived with our parents, before we got married. We’d... well.” 

“Eww,” Yuffie protested and Tifa elbowed her, but Barret laughed. 

“Never thought anything of it at the time,” he shrugged, “Never got attacked by anything. Never knew anyone who did, for that matter.” 

Reeve itched for his office’s intranet connection, suddenly compelled to check the statistics on monster attacks over the past years. In his childhood fascination with the strange creatures that roamed the planet he had similarly viewed them as something distant and almost mythical, never having imagined he’d encounter them with the frequency he had since assuming the role of Cait Sith. 

“There are monsters all over Wutai,” Yuffie offered, “Giant bugs that leave dust everywhere. They’re really gross.” 

“Damn,” Barret sighed, “You know, I always thought I’d be able to take Marlene camping. Thought it’s something a kid should get to do, especially living in Midgar. Not sure I’d want to after the past couple of weeks.” 

Tifa nodded, “I know what you mean... What do you think Red?” 

The Cosmo Beast growled lowly, swishing his tail in a few wide arcs that Reeve was beginning to recognize as a sign that he was disturbed by something. 

“In my childhood, years before the war with the West, the Gi tribe made use of trained creatures to supplement their forces. I don’t recall frequent unprovoked attacks by wild things.” 

Across the camp, Vincent had stashed his tent away with Aeris’s help, and she was prodding him to eat something she had pulled out of her traveling bag. 

“Do you think it’s to do with the reactors?” Tifa asked Red XIII, but before he could answer Barret cut them off.

“Of course it’s the fucking reactors. None of this shit was going on before Shinra started messing with the lifestream.” 

“You don’t know that,” Yuffie protested, “We don’t have any reactors in Wutai and we still have monsters everywhere, ever since the war. Mako energy makes people’s lives so much _better_ in the East – you don’t _know_ –” 

“The hell I don’t!” Barret interrupted her, “None of this was going on twenty years ago! The only difference is fucking Shinra and –”

Tifa stilled him with a hand on his arm as the teenager shrank back, startled by his sudden outburst. He glared at Tifa a moment, then deflated turning back to Yuffie, “Sorry about that.” 

“Yuffie,” Tifa cut in, “We just crossed the Nibel mountains... they didn’t look like that before the reactor. Things used to grow there. Lots of things, not just the weeds. The mountains are dying. And the monsters that lived there... they’re getting pushed out. Or they’re… changing.” 

“The reactors create a lot of seismic noise that could be affecting them.” 

It took Reeve a moment to realize that Cait Sith had been the one to make the suggestion, the thought escaping unbidden from his mind in recollection of geological surveys done while planning the Reactor 1 restoration project. _What the hell am I doing?_

He was saved any deeper introspection when Yuffie mumbled, “Yeah, _whatever_. Guess you don’t want your daughter to live an easier life,” and sulked off to pack up her tent. 

Barret looked angrily after her for a moment, then slumped. 

“Look, I want Marlene to have everything,” Barret sighed to the remaining group, “but the price is too high, for this.” 

“I know,” Tifa agreed softly, and Red XIII offered a growl that seemed to be an assent. Reeve and his little avatar nodded along, in spite of himself. 

In his ship cabin, he stared at the ceiling from where he laid on the little bunk, head resting on his interlaced fingers. He wasn’t _closed_ to alternative forms of energy, knew perfectly well that they had gotten along well enough before Mako with coal and oil, although the Midgar smog was hugely improved by their phasing out over the previous fifteen years. All the spiritual nonsense that had turned him off in Cosmo Canyon during the war set aside, there was increasing evidence that Mako energy was carrying its own set of problems. 

He sighed and wondered if he’d been following AVALANCHE around for too long. Heidegger had made some one-off comment about not going native, when the project was first proposed, and to his distaste Reeve was beginning to worry that the man might actually have been right. 

Conversation broken by the argument, the group that had been gathered around Cait Sith gradually wandered away, tidying supplies or packing up for the day. 

Across, and seemingly making a concerted effort not to listen in, Aeris was seated on a large boulder in front of Vincent and had pulled his prosthetic arm into her lap, coaxing it to turn from side to side and testing the reflex of the fingers. It would have felt too invasive, Reeve thought, if someone else had tried the same – crossing some intangible yet imminently salient point of personal boundaries. Somehow Aeris just moved freely across the divisions between people as if they had never existed to begin with. 

Vincent for his part seemed to have shrunken inside his oversized cloak, but didn’t pull away as the young woman bent over his upturned palm. 

Doing the math, Reeve suspected strongly that the graft allowing the Turk to use the arm must have been done at the very advent of the technology. When considering the thirty years in between, it was a clear predecessor of the way the implant was typically seen during the war, when Shinra had begun developing technology to support cybernetic super soldiers. The entire project had collapsed after a few years, too many side effects ranging from chronic pain to phantom limbs. Being the subject of an early model couldn’t have been without issue for its recipient. 

Considering, he turned the cat’s attention to the gun grafted into Barret’s right arm. The man never expressed any discomfort, but it had clearly been done after the war when the military project had already collapsed under the weight of its failures. Combined with the lack of Shinra records of the man’s surgery, Reeve could only surmise that it had been done by some back-alley sawbones. His stomach turned to think of it. 

As Reeve watched, the man in question made his way over to the last tent still containing an inhabitant and gave it a shake. 

“Yo! Cloud! Let’s a get a move on!” 

Cloud’s buster sword preceded him out of the tent but Barret had already jumped back, laughing as the rumpled leader of AVALANCHE emerged looking first grumpy, then sheepish. 

Reeve thought back to the conversation he’d had with Tifa riding in the back of the buggy, what had begun to feel like a very long time ago, and wondered if she had been right about the relationship between the men. He didn’t doubt the young woman’s perceptions, precisely, it was clear that the entire of the team had been drawn to Cloud – but Barret seemed so... _straight_. 

_Don’t go native,_ he felt the sudden itch of worry that his own new suspicions regarding Mako energy really might be a product of his relationship to the company he was keeping. It felt easy to recall to mind all the small gestures of affection that had been directed at Cait Sith by the members of AVALANCHE, rubbing his ears in slow moments and keeping the equipment that would keep him safe. Easy to recall the comfortable way Barret had reached out and pulled the little robot into his arms in Cosmo Canyon, at the base of the embankment on Mt Nibel, around the campfire the night before. Those had clearly been an automatic gesture on Barret’s part, possibly missing his daughter and looking for comfort or too used to reaching out and offering it, an instinct easily directed toward the little cat. The man’s laid-back confidence and willingness to reach out – between fits of temper – combined with the genuine interest he took in his teammates made it easy to see how the man had been able to raise an insurgency in the first place. 

As if in answer to Reeve’s thoughts, Barret reached out and ruffled Cloud’s hair while the younger man huffed and waved him away, blond hair bouncing stubbornly back into spikes unaided. 

As they finished packing and prepared to get underway, Tifa found her way over to Vincent to ask him about the monster population in his youth. 

He shook his head and confirmed, “Almost unheard of. Those things last night... they were clearly more of Hojo’s chimeras.” 

“Hojo?” Aeris asked, and for a brief horrible moment Reeve thought back to encountering her in the Shinra medical labs, “He... did that to people?”

“Is it so hard to imagine, after what he’s done to his own son?” 

“His son?” 

“Sephiroth... isn’t the entire goal of your journey to find him?”

Reeve sat up abruptly, ignoring the way his head spun at the sudden transition out of the cat, “Son of a _bitch_.” 

As he had come to expect, there was nothing in his files. While Reeve searched the information he had with him in the middle of the Junon ocean, AVALANCHE got underway.


	17. Chapter 17

Leaving the mountains, it had been possible to see in the distance wide tracts of developed agricultural land, squared off and neatly maintained as they stretched across the plains. After days of walking however it proved to be an optical illusion, many of the closer farms unkept and abandoned, leading to long days passing through dry fields and empty settlements before things turned green again. 

Reeve had endured four interminable days on the ship with nothing to do, and had responded by ensconcing himself in his cabin, in the Cait Sith. By the third day he found that he left the cabin only for food. When the ship was preparing to dock in Costa del Sol he thought he heard whispers about his odd and reclusive behaviour onboard, but couldn’t bring himself to care. 

Over the same time, AVALANCHE had finally made it to Rocket Town, getting their first look at the old Shinra 26 looming over the city at around the same time that Reeve was repacking his luggage and confirming his hotel information. The trip to Costa del Sol had been marked by hours of tedium and extended sleep, in sharp contrast to how the trip to Rocket Town had been marked largely by long days, sore feet, and occasional panic as strange creatures emerged from the abandoned dwellings where humans had once prospered. 

“I call the first shower!” Yuffie announced as they approached the center of the town and an Inn came into view at, the teenager finding a fresh store of energy somewhere to take off running toward the building. 

“Oh, _hot water_ ,” Aeris agreed, as if it had only just occurred to her, and soon enough the entire group was in the Inn lobby waiting for room keys. 

The apologetic innkeeper, clearly overwhelmed by the sudden patronage, lead them up the stairs to the available rooms. 

“Yuffie wait, we need to make plans!” Cloud called after the teenager, but she was already disappearing into the second of the two doors. 

She popped her head briefly back around the doorframe to shout back, “Just decide whatever and tell me about it later!” before slamming the door closed behind her. 

Barret laughed unapologetically after the young woman even as Cloud glared at him. 

“Everyone settle in and get cleaned up,” Cloud finally announced to the group cramped into the hallway and staircase outside the small Inn’s rooms, “We’ll split into two groups tonight, one to scout out the town –”

“– and one to talk with the locals at the pub downstairs,” Tifa finished for him, and after a surprised moment he nodded to her. 

With a bit of shuffling, they moved their gear, and themselves, into the rooms. 

\---

Not long before AVALANCHE began settling into the Inn, the Shinra navy ship finished docking in Costa del Sol and spilled its non-essential passengers out into the port. Armed with a week’s hotel reservation and a mission to secure an ill-defined contract for roadworks, Reeve trundled his luggage along the docks toward the tourist district. 

It was... not as bad as he had expected. Although the sunset had been hours before, the city was still alive with activity, bright coloured lanterns hanging from the shops and terraces where nightlife spilled out into the streets. Music floated out from bars as live bands competed for the attention of passersby to wander in for a drink. 

It felt strange in contrast to all the quiet, suffering places that Reeve had visited as Cait Sith in the weeks since he’d joined up with AVALANCHE. With his legs still wobbly from the time at sea and his suit shirt clinging to his back with sweat in the tropical heat, he made his way thought the cheerful night of the vacation resort. It wasn’t really like being were the little cat was, on the far end of their link, but it was being _somewhere_. 

Maybe Rufus had been right after all, about him needing a break. 

With only half his thoughts on navigating the cobbled streets of the Costa del Sol Old Town toward his hotel, he peered through the cat to the inn in Rocket Town, where the Cait Sith robots had shuffled into a room with the men. 

Cloud had already slipped away to the bathroom, declaring his intention to wash off the effects of a week’s travel before going out to see if he could learn anything about the state of affairs in town. Sitting across from one another on two of the beds, Barret was engaged in a lively and largely one-sided conversation with Vincent about his prosthetic, although even to Reeve’s untrained ear it sounded largely superficial. 

“I’m calling next shower, buddy,” Barret told Vincent, giving him a comradely slap on the shoulder when the sound of running water finally cut off in the adjoining bathroom, “Gotta get down to the bar or Tifa’s gonna be disappointed.” 

Reeve doubted both that Tifa would beat him downstairs by any significant margin (or that she would be disappointed if she did) but smiled nevertheless. He watched with some interest as Barret disconnected the large machine gun hanging from his right arm, rotating the shoulder a few times while he rubbed at it as if he’d spent a long time carrying something quite heavy. Which, Reeve supposed, he had. 

Weapon disconnected, he made short work of taping plastic over the graft point that was left (a series of exposed gears and wires that must have tied the weapon into his nervous system when he wore it) in the style of someone protecting the cast on a broken arm, but with the practiced ease of someone who had been doing it for many years. 

In Costa del Sol Reeve had found his hotel, a luxurious place almost on top of the port and facing out over the beach. He knew without doubt before walking in that his single room there would be bigger than the one that Cait Sith was sharing with three other people in Rocket Town. And lonelier, for that matter. 

He sighed and walked in. 

In Rocket Town, Cloud emerged from the bathroom in a puff of steam, hair for once fallen wetly around his face, and stepped aside to let Barret take his place. 

“Will you come out with us?” he asked Vincent, as he overturned his pack on the remaining bed, presumably searching for fresh clothing, “You’d be a good person to have around, I think. You might notice something that we don’t with everything you know about Sephiroth and Shinra.” 

“I...” Vincent began, then looked away, “All the same, I think it might be better for everyone involved if I have less contact with the locals. I may still be... dangerous.” 

Cloud frowned at that, then hid his expression as he began pulling on a fresh shirt and arranging his gear, finally grunting, “Don’t come if you think you’re going to be trouble.” 

Vincent turned to stare out the window wordlessly as Cloud exited, and Reeve cringed in spite of himself. 

“Hey there,” Cait Sith chirped when he heard Cloud’s boots descending the stairs in a fast trot, “He didn’t mean it like that. I don’t think. He’s just been a lot more intense since we were in Nibelheim,” and as Reeve said it, he realized it was true. 

Vincent glanced over at him, red eyes flicking appraisingly between the cat and the moogle before turning back out the window, and he said nothing. 

Reeve sighed and let it go, letting the cat settle into a comfortable loaf on the moogle’s fluffy white head to wait. 

He made it through the queue at the front desk and was digging out his reservation when the robot’s AI next signalled for his attention, and he turned his mind to the cat in time to see Barret walk out of the bathroom wearing only a towel. 

“Oh my god,” Reeve said aloud, his Shinra charge card dropping from suddenly numb fingers.

“Are you alright, sir?” the buxom hostess at the desk asked him as the plastic card skittered across the lobby tiles. Instead of answering Reeve dropped to his knees to fumble for the card, gathering a few moments to collect himself. 

“I’m sorry,” he finally told her, “I was not prepared.” 

She accepted the explanation along with his cards and reservation. 

He took his room key and made his way to the top of the building where a spacious suite waited for him, sweating from more than the Costa del Sol heat as he wondered whether he was doing a sufficient job of affecting feline disinterest at the other end of his neural link. 

After long days on the ship of solitary introspection regarding his motivations relating to the former leader of AVALANCHE, a visual aide had not been something he’d needed. 

In the little room in Rocket Town, Barret had seated himself at the table with a kit of oil and small brushes that he was using to clean residue of the past week out of the graft point on his arm. As he arranged the implements in easy reach of his left hand, Vincent approached on soft feet and joined him at the table. 

“What is all this?” 

“Huh?” Barret looked up at him from where he was scrubbing grime out of a joint with a repurposed toothbrush, “my kit?” 

The Turk made a noise of affirmation as he slid into the seat across from Barret, tentatively plucking a vial of mineral oil from the table and turning it over in his hand. 

“Just the usual stuff that goes whole process, I guess. Nuthin’ special.” 

Vincent didn’t reply and Barret frowned, stopping what he was doing to give the other man his full attention, “You got all the instructions after the surgery, right?” 

Before replying, Vincent dropped the vial back onto the table between them, “I... may have been one of the first recipients of the procedure. There wasn’t... a specific method recommended at the time... and then the basement...”

“Aww hell,” Barret frowned, and from his vantage point atop the moogle Reeve saw the effort the big man was making to school his features at yet another horrible revelation from their new companion, “Don’t worry, I got your back. We’ll figure what you need.” 

Reeve forcefully pulled his attention back to his suite in Costa del Sol. The conversation between the men at the table had taken on a tone of intimacy that had lacked in the brash discourse earlier in the evening, and somehow listening in had suddenly seemed more voyeuristic than witnessing Barret’s state of undress. 

\---

In his hotel room, Reeve glanced out the window onto the expanse of ocean, the beach below him a constellation of patios and bonfires populated by groups of vacationers. It was apparently still early in the night by Costa del Sol standards, and he reflected that after his days of enforced rest at sea it would be the perfect time to take advantage and kick back before entering what was sure to be a harrowing week of meetings with the contractor – some guy named Mukki – that his assistant had scheduled for him starting the next morning. 

He emptied his pockets onto a table in the suite’s outer room before carrying his briefcase and luggage into the bedroom, depositing them on a dresser. 

Staring at the luggage where it dropped, another piece in the luxuriously impersonal room, he considered taking the time to himself and going out to experience the Costa del Sol night life. 

After a moment, he closed the lights, kicked off his shoes and dropped onto the plush king size bed, mind drifting to take control of the cat. 

Drifting back to the Cait Sith’s awareness he was relieved to see that Barret had dressed and was preparing to leave the room, Vincent having retreated back to his perch beside the window to stare out at the rocket’s leaning silhouette in the falling dark. 

“Was the space program already running when you were with the Turks?” Reeve asked him on impulse. 

“Barely,” Vincent answered, eyes still fixed out the window, “Some rockets had been built, short range ballistics. The thought of making it to space was an ambitious fantasy.” 

“Still is,” Barret told him from the doorway, “The 26 never launched, some kind of accident. It was in the news a few years ago.” 

Vincent didn’t answer, and Barret turned to Cait Sith, “Hey Cait, you comin’ down to the bar?” 

The robot’s ears picked up in a gesture that Reeve had once practiced until the sides of his face ached.

“Sure thing!” Cait Sith dropped off the moogle and scampered out the door as Barret opened it, weaving around his feet in the small passage outside the rooms. 

“Hey now, if you’re not actually a cat you don’t need to trip anyone,” Barret scolded him, and for a horrible moment Reeve thought again that he’d been found out before laughing to realize that of course the team all considered Cait Sith a robot first and cat second. 

In a fluid motion Barrt had scooped up the cat again – Reeve catching his breath at the phantom constriction around his rib cage – and took the stairs down two at a time. 

“Thought you got lost, slow pokes,” Tifa greeted them in the lobby, and lifted the robot out of Barret’s grip when he was near enough, holding it disconcertingly like a toddler and making Reeve squirm in discomfort. 

“But we just got down here...?” Red XIII asked her, only for Aeris to hush him that he hadn’t been supposed to let them know that. 

Barret rolled his shoulders and grinned, “Well now, it’s always good to know that the party doesn’t start until we get here.” 

“Can we go?” Cloud asked impatiently as if the other man hadn’t spoken. 

Aeris and Tifa shared an eye roll before parting, Aeris and Red XIII following Cloud out into the evening while the remaining team entered what appeared to be the local watering hole. 

Yuffie was there ahead of them, already warming a spot at the bar and chatting with the bartender. 

“Whoa, whoa!” Barret protested, marching across to her and grabbing the drink out of her hand as Tifa dropped Cait Sith onto one of the bar stools. 

“Hey!” Yuffie shouted and tried to grab her drink back, but Barret held it over her head like an elder brother playing keep away. 

“What’s in here, anyway?” Barret interrogated her, and she scowled. 

“None of your business, give it back!” 

Tifa turned a disapproving expression on the bartender and told him, “She’s _sixteen_.” 

The man blanched and retreated as Barret poured out the drink into the sink behind the bar. 

“You guys both _suck_ ,” Yuffie opined, glaring. 

“Yep,” Barret agreed, dropping onto the stool next to her and patting her on the back, “Tough luck, kiddo.” 

Yuffie huffed but didn’t answer. 

“I’ll make you something,” Tifa offered, undeterred when the teenager shrugged sullenly at her, and turned to the bartender with a warm smile, “You know, I used to keep bar back in Midgar. I don’t suppose you’d let me keep my hand in, for the night?” 

The man, perhaps relieved that the pair of quite intimidating adventurers had no further objection to his mistake, or perhaps just pleased for the company of a charming young woman behind the bar, lifted the counter to allow her to join him. 

“Thanks,” Tifa said as she scooted past him, “I was really starting to get homesick for the old place.” 

The man nodded and let the counter fall back into place as she began checking his inventory. 

“Here Yuffie,” she said after a moment, “I’ll make you a virgin Final Heaven. It’s one of my specials.” 

Yuffie snorted, but watched with interest as Tifa began layering syrups and juices into a martini glass. 

“... So what brings y’all here?” the bartender asked after a few moments watching Tifa’s expert navigation of the hind-bar. 

“In town looking for a friend,” Barret answered, “Heard he was travelling in the area and thought he might have stopped here.” 

The bartender frowned, “You mean the Shinra people?” 

“Shinra?” Barret asked, and Reeve braced himself to intervene, over-accustomed to the man’s temper being set off by mention of the corporation. 

He needn’t have worried, Barret’s ire staying tidily in check as the bartender answered. 

“Whole delegation set to arrive tomorrow, meetin’ with the Captain – uhh, he’s a bit of a local hero – prob’ly good you guys showed up tonight or you wouldn’t’a gotten rooms.” 

“Big contingent then?” Barret raised his eyebrows and leaned in, resting his good arm on the bar. 

“Pretty big from the sound,” the man nodded. Beside them, Tifa dropped a colorful umbrella into the Martini glass and slid it across the bar to Yuffie, who accepted it with grudging curiosity. 

“Biggest we’ve had since the accident,” the man confirmed, “My buddy who did the booking says there’s at least two dozen comin’, had to send some of them to another place up the way.” 

“No kidding,” Barret enthused, then turned to Cait Sith, “Hear that Cait? Got a whole Shinra party coming. Think we’ll recognize anyone?” 

_I really hope not_ , Reeve didn’t say, guiding the robot to cock its head thoughtfully to one side, “Who do you think would come here?” 

If the bartender was surprised to see the chipper robot as a patron in his bar, he hid it well, and answered before Barret could, “Don’t know, but the Captain seemed to think it was top brass. He comes in for a drink, sometimes, you know.” 

“Does he?” Tifa asked, pulling down a few more glasses from a rack above the bar. 

“Oh ayuh,” the man agreed, “Couple times a week, when he’s been fighting with that girl a’ his.” 

“Huh,” Barret mused, raising his eyebrows at Tifa, who nodded before turning to Cait Sith. 

“I know you don’t eat, Cait, but I don’t suppose you drink?” 

“Oh I couldn’t possibly, Miss Tifa,” he chirped back to her, “I’m only one year old, you know.” 

Beside him, Barret snorted and Yuffie huffed again, but Tifa hushed them.

“What about you Barret?” she asked, “the usual?” 

“You know it,” he agreed, a wide smile appearing on his face as she reached for the whiskey on the back wall and proceeded to pour two glasses. She raised her eyebrows at the bartender, and when he nodded she poured a third. 

“It’s quiet here tonight,” Tifa observed, raising her glass to the assembled group. 

“Give it some time,” the bartender answered, returning her salute before taking a sip of his own drink, “Folks ‘round here wander in after dark. Too much to do before then.” 

They did wait, round after round while the bar stayed largely empty. The few patrons who did wander through offered nothing of particular advantage. In spite of her initial protests Yuffie finished off four of the drinks Tifa made for her, and spent an extended stretch spinning Cait Sith’s bar stool while the little cat whooped and giggled and Reeve buried his face in the hotel’s plush pillows in dizzy protest. The bartender seemed happy for their company in spite of the quiet night, and was laughing at a self-deprecating story Barret was telling about getting locked out of 7th Heaven in his underwear (“I still don’t know what you were doing out there in your underwear anyway,” Tifa had interjected, and Barret answered “I had to take the trash out! It seemed like the right idea at the time!”) when the rest of the group returned from their evening trip. 

“Anything?” Cloud asked the group, making a face as he took in the scene at the bar. 

“Quiet night,” Tifa told him, and Reeve wondered if her flush was from the alcohol or from the intensity of Cloud’s regard. 

“Heard there’s a big crowd coming in late tomorrow,” Barret cut in, possibly noticing Tifa’s discomfort, “How about you guys?”

“Nothing that won’t wait until morning,” Aeris told them, planting a hand in the middle of Cloud’s chest when he looked like he wanted to object and steering him toward the stairs. Looking over her shoulder to the group assembled at the bar she asked, “You guys staying down here a while longer or are you headed up?” 

Tifa and Barret looked at one another and shrugged. 

“Gonna head up soon,” Tifa answered, “Not much happening around here.” 

As the group that had just come in made their way toward the stairs, Yuffie jumped off her seat at the bar and trotted after them, “Hey wait up! Did you see the rocket? What was it like? Did you get to go inside?” 

Tifa and Barret shared a smile, and Reeve felt more than usual like an interloper as the friends finished their drinks in silence. After a few moments the bartender drifted off to wipe down some tables on the far side of the room, clearly also sensing that his evening’s business was coming to a close. 

The effect was intensified when, drinks finished and bar tidied, Barret held the counter up chivalrously while Tifa ducked under his arm. 

“Thanks Barret,” she told him, and it seemed like she was talking about more than just the counter. 

“Just like old times, huh?” he asked her.

She nodded, looking suddenly distant, “You think it can ever be like that again?” 

Barret sighed, “Was tonight, for a little while. Better not to worry about it too much for now. C’mon and let’s get to bed, tomorrow’s already coming.” 

She hummed lowly and led the way up the stairs, Cait Sith trailing in the rear. For the second time that night, he had the sense that he was bearing witness to something private, and hovered on the steps when Tifa and Barret paused on the landing. 

Instead of saying something, after a moment Tifa turned and wrapped her arms around the big man, burying her face in his neck. After a pause, he wrapped his good arm around her back and dropped a kiss onto the top of her head.

“Love you, Barret,” she spoke into his chest. 

“I know you do, sweetie,” he told her, stroking her back comfortingly. 

“And I love Cloud.” 

“I know that, too,” he answered. 

“Good,” Tifa pulled away from him, looking him over and giving a nod, “Just... Good.” 

She let herself into her room and the door shut softly behind her. 

After a moment, Barret turned, “Don’t just stand there cat, get a move on.” 

“Barret I’m sorry,” Reeve started in the cat’s voice, “I didn’t mean to –” 

“Don’t worry about it,” the big man waved his hand, dismissively, “Tifa’s always been emotional on whiskey. And she’s lost an awful lot, the last couple of years. We all have.” 

He pulled their door open, and Cait Sith slunk past him into the room. 

\---

The next morning Reeve was able to catch Heidegger in the office when he called in, asking about the Shinra presence in Rocket Town. 

“Aha, yeah, you’ve got Rufus headed your way with Palmer and a bunch of grunts. Can’t keep that little punk in the office two minutes since his old man kicked it.” 

Horrified but determined to focus on the salient points of the statement, Reeve answered, “I just saw Rufus in Midgar last week. How did he get to Rocket Town ahead of me?” 

“Musta taken Shinra private transport,” Reeve thought he could hear Heidegger’s dismissive shrug through the phone line, “Kid moves around. Just try to keep him and AVALANCHE separate, yeah?” 

Reeve pinched the bridge of his nose. The headaches that had followed him since activating the Cait Sith had receded after days of enforced rest while at sea, but the crackle of Heidegger’s horse laugh heard through the international lines was bringing it back out. 

“I’ll do what I can. Also, a couple of days ago Valentine suggested that Hojo is Sephiroth’s father. Is there any record of that anywhere?” 

“No shit?” Heidegger laughed again, “Nothing I know of – but it’s hard to keep track of all of Hojo’s bastards. I tell you Reeve, if I knew how a creepy guy like that kept convincing women to sleep with him –”

“Some questions are better left unanswered,” Reeve interrupted him, cringing.

“Sure, sure. Look, Sephiroth is a masterpiece. Was, at least. I wouldn’t put anything past Hojo’s ego, with an opportunity like that.” 

“Opportunity?” 

“Aw hell, Reeve. You know what I mean. Anyway, I’ll pass it off to the Turks and see if they come back with anything from the R&D files. Good work keeping your ears open, Reeve.” 

The line went dead in Reeve’s hand – an experience he was becoming increasingly familiar with in his interactions with his fellow executives – and he sighed. 

He dropped the phone back into its cradle, and spent the morning answering four days’ worth of backed up emails.


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A large chunk of dialogue between Cloud and Cid here lifted directly from the game. Early warning for whatever uncomfortable feelings go with that...

“ _Your_ type of people,” Rufus had said when he’d proposed Reeve’s trip, and with a sinking sick feeling he was beginning to suspect what had been meant by it. 

Both the young president’s meaning, the sudden feeling that his week was about to go very, very poorly were vivid points in Reeve’s mind as he crossed the sunlit patio after a bikini clad waitress to where three men waited at a corner table. 

“Reeve!” one of the men shouted, a broad, shirtless man in faded cut offs and thong sandals, whose mustache preceded him. 

Reeve knew the man by professional reputation alone, as one of many bidders on the Neo Midgar project and a subcontractor who had worked with his department in the past. It was the first time Reeve was meeting him directly, so he was unprepared when the man ignored his outstretched hand and drew him into an exuberant and sweaty hug. 

“Mr. Mukki,” Reeve greeted him, patting him awkwardly on the back with the hand not holding his briefcase.

“Please, just Mukki. It’s great to finally meet you,” he released Reeve from the bear hug to grab him by the shoulders and look him up and down like they were old friends, making Reeve feel vaguely violated, “Congratulations on the promotion, buddy! Damn shame what happened to your old boss, hey?”

When the man dropped into his seat, leaning close to one of the other men to say something Reeve didn’t catch, Reeve tried surreptitiously to straighten his rumpled suit jacket. 

Obviously he had not been subtle enough, as Mukki asked, “What are you so dressed up for, huh? Don’t you know it’s thirty-five degrees out here? Here, pull up a chair. Have you met my colleague Mario? Mario, this is Reeve. Reeve, sit down already…”

The meeting continued as badly as he expected, no fortune telling robots necessary. 

\---

Reeve’s second morning of the day succeeded in being more unsettling than the first. 

He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t intuited that they would find Highwind in Rocket Town, haunting the base of the abandoned Shinra 26 exactly as he had been a lively extension of the project when it was still active. 

Although he’d never been to Rocket Town himself, Reeve recognized Cid from Midgar. While they had never worked on any mutual projects, the man had been a regular in the Shinra building toward the end of the war around the same time that Reeve had begun his sharp ascent through the Urban Development department. He would have been shocked if the recollection was mutual however, the young pilot he remembered seeming uncomfortable in the building and suffering from a perpetual itch to be anywhere but Midgar. After the failed launch, Cid’s appearances had become fewer and fewer between, less enthusiastic and more formal on every occasion, until at some point he had simply not retuned, leaving all dealing with the Space Department to be handled by Palmer’s questionable competencies. 

The files that Reeve pulled up on the man largely confirmed what he already knew – that he had been an engineer with the airforce during the war, until the Space Program had made the leap from research to development. Highwind was brilliant, capable, and just ambitious enough to be foolish anyway. He was still technically a Shinra employee, kept on retainer and bound by a non-disclosure agreement regarding military secrets from the failed rocket launch. 

The man that AVALANCHE encountered shortly before Rufus’s arrival was less tightly wound than the young pilot Reeve had known (or perhaps differently wound, as Cid was clearly still a high-strung personality) but he seemed less driven. Dulled at the edges, from time or from failure Reeve was uncertain. Even ignoring the shocking treatment of his girlfriend, Reeve recognized that the man had the potential to be trouble – both from his expertise within the Shinra corporation, and from his hot temper and tendency to lean into confrontation. 

So it was not really a surprise when, jilted by Rufus, Cid had joined AVALANCHE in driving Palmer away from the repurposed light combat aircraft he maintained in his back fields. 

A greater shock came moments later when one of the Shinra supply vehicles emerged around a corner at speed and connected solidly with Palmer’s retreating form. 

“Come on Cait, let’s go!” Cloud shouted as he and Aeris clambered onto the wildly spinning Tiny Bronco.

“What about Palmer?” Reeve had asked in the cat’s voice, small and lost in the roar of engines and the suppressing fire the team’s gunners directed toward the approaching Shinra infantry. 

“Shinra will take care of him, we need to GO!” Cloud shouted to be heard but the cat stood rooted to the spot, struggling to process the sudden violent accident visited on a man he had worked more or less up the hall from for the past ten years. 

“Cait, _NOW_.” Cloud yelled to deaf ears.

While he stared transfixed at the ruined form of what had been Palmer (not someone he had liked, certainly, but a constant in his life, a known value suddenly ended) hands hooked under the robot’s arms and it was flung into the air. 

Cloud caught him effortlessly and settled him on the top wing of the plane beside Aeris, instructing him to hold on. Then spun to grab Cid’s arm as he jumped up and pull him the rest of the way as the plane bucked and spun beneath them. 

“Do you even know how dangerous this is!?” Cid shouted

“No choice!” Cloud answered.

It was a terrible choice. 

With no control over the heading, only chance sent the Bronco spiralling off toward the ocean rather than the mountain range behind them. Cid tried valiantly to get the side hatch open and get inside of the plane, but it was useless, the combination of wind resistance and the dizzying dip and wobble of the Tiny Bronco as it soared further from the earth below left him clinging to the wing and powerless to control the aircraft’s final descent – only the water landing saving them from shattering to pieces along with the plane. 

“Hold onto your drawers and don’t piss in ‘em.” Cid had shouted when it became clear the crash was inevitable, and it reached Reeve as if from great distance, followed by near-manic laughter from Aeris beside him. 

Cait Sith avoided being thrown free of the craft only by the chance that the plane took a final desperate buck before catching its tail and slapping downward into the ocean. The eventual impact made his gears rattle so hard that Reeve felt it in Costa del Sol, but failed to pitch him from where he gripped desperately to the plane. 

A brief moment of terrible silence accompanied the Bronco’s coming to a rest in the northern ocean, the passengers clinging even after the craft came to a rest as if not ready to believe that things had ended well, shaken in their bones from the impact and sudden stillness. 

Bits of the plane roiled in the waters around the Bronco. The waves and occasional plinks of debris bumping up against the side of the chassis were the only noise for a long stretch, even the sea birds absent and noiseless in the wake of the crash.

Reeve remembered to breathe again slowly. He hadn’t been in any real danger, he had to remind himself. Reeve was a man in Costa del Sol, and the little avatar was mapping its experience into his nervous system vicariously, but the adrenaline and terror of the flight were no less present for it. 

He made a conscious effort to unclasp his fists, finding that they had bunched in the seat of the sofa in his hotel suite in empathy with the robot, even as he had retreated into his own mind on realizing that things were going badly for his other self. 

Sweat dripped into his eyes, and he rubbed it away jerkily, before turning his attention to the Cait Sith where it clung to an airplane’s wing in the northern sea. 

He made a second effort of will, this time to uncurl the robot’s mechanical paws from where they were locked into the joint of a wing. Sat up. Looked around. 

Cid got to his feet first, his stance as solid as if he’d only just finished bringing in the evening paper, but his expression stormy. 

Cloud too had sat up, gaze following the smoke trail back across the sky the way they had come, the land a shimmering line on the horizon. Shinra wouldn’t be able to follow them. Not directly, at least.

Reeve felt a pang for the team back in Rocket Town, but knew that the Shinra force was small and had never been there for AVALANCHE in the first place. He hoped both sides would cut their losses and retreat since it was clear that the plane was no longer a contested resource. He hoped. 

And Aeris...

Aeris was glowing, Reeve saw with confusion. She was on her feet in a moment, wobbling as the plane moved beneath her, twisting and throwing her arms out for balance as she ran across the cockpit onto the opposite wing of the ship, throwing her arms around Cloud exuberantly before letting go and subjecting Cid to the same. 

“Cid, that was _wonderful_.” She told him, face open and delighted, “I’ve never flown before.” 

Cid stood frozen a moment, arms out rigid at his sides as if uncertain what was happening. 

When the young woman pulled away she patted him on the shoulders a few times, “Thank you, Cid.” 

The pilot grunted and his shoulders slumped, but his expression had softened. 

After another moment Aeris had wobbled and slid back to beside Cait Sith, lifting him and subjecting him to the same fierce hug. Whether she really was reacting to the joy of flight, or possibly just the giddy relief of having survived, Reeve wasn’t sure – but the grip on the little cat made him uncomfortably aware of how his shirt clung to his torso with fear sweat. 

“Cait, is it safe for you to be near so much water?” She asked, holding him tighter instead of putting him down. 

“I...” Reeve paused, turning the cat’s head in all directions to regard the expanse of sea, the slow rocking of the plane where it moved with the waves. Cait Sith’s bright timber thankfully masked his sudden concern as he answered, “I don’t know.” 

As if in answer to the robot’s distress Cloud asked, “Can we get this thing back to shore?”

“ _This thing’s_ name is the Bronco,” Cid snapped, then after a pause added, voice distant as if talking only to himself, “She’ll float okay. Stripped down all the munitions a few years back and she’ll float okay. She won’t fly again.” 

“Can we use it as a boat?”

Cid’s jaw flexed, and for a moment Reeve thought that he would lose his temper, but he only slumped again.

“Fuck, do whatever you want.” 

Aeris’s arms tightened around the little cat, but she said nothing. 

Looking at Cid, Reeve wasn’t sure he’d ever seen the pilot so disheartened, even that last time he’d seen the man in Midgar after the Space Program was definitively canceled. 

Cursing, the man pulled a pack of cigarettes out of a front pocket of his jacket and a zippo from another, sparking one to life and inhaling deeply. 

“Cid, what will you do now?”

As if he hadn’t heard Cloud speak, Cid walked to the furthest point of one of the plane’s wings and sat, dangling his feet over the edge toward the water below, as if distancing himself as much as possible from both AVALANCHE at the events of the morning. 

They sat on the plane a long time, Cloud staring intently at the strip of land visible in the distance. Aeris kept the Cait Sith held securely in her lap. As uncomfortable as he felt, Reeve found he was grateful for it. He wasn’t sure what she planned to do in the event something did happen to pitch them into the open ocean, but her intention filled him with a spreading warmth. 

After Cid had tossed a third cigarette butt sizzling into the water beneath him, he stood and faced them. 

“I’m done with Shinra,” he announced, “And I’ve given up on the town.” 

“And your wife?” Cloud asked. 

Cid’s expression soured, “Wife? Shera? Don’t make me laugh. Just thinkin’ ‘bout marrying her gives me the chills.”

Reeve thought back to the soft spoken, nervous woman who had prepared tea for the party just a few short hours before, and wasn’t sure what to say. 

When no one else answered either, Cid continued, “What’re you guys gonna do?” 

Cloud told him about Sephiroth, and Shinra. Cid told them about the Temple of the Ancients. 

It might have been Reeve’s imagination, but he thought that Aeris gripped the cat just a little tighter as they discussed the heading. 

“Can you get it moving?” Cloud finally asked, tapping his toe against the Bronco’s cockpit. 

“Reckon I can,” Cid answered after a moment’s consideration, “I stripped her down good after the war, but the engine’s well insulated. As long as she’s not flooded she should move.” 

Finally able to pull the hatch open with the plane stationary, Cid dropped into the cockpit, and after what felt like an interminable time adrift the plane lurched back to life, propelling them toward the distant shore. 

\---

Reeve’s call to Heidegger that evening ended up being longer than usual. 

Palmer had apparently been taken to a Shinra medical center on the outskirts of Rocket Town and was in stable condition, to Reeve’s relief. 

While reporting that Highwind had joined up with AVALANCHE, perhaps on the impulse of the strange un-reality of the afternoon, Reeve withheld the man’s intention to go after Rufus. He didn’t feel any attachment to Cid, exactly, but felt somehow certain that the threat was the kind of thing said impulsively in anger, not with any special intention behind it. And with the pilot cooling off in the middle of the northern ocean, Reeve didn’t think that Rufus was in any immediate danger. 

There was also the matter of the shy, mousy woman in Rocket Town, who was certain to be the first target if Highwind attracted too much attention. 

“You know that bastard’s still on payroll, right?” Heidegger said on the subject. 

“I know,” Reeve agreed – the file was open in front of him, one of the first things he’d done when his nerves had settled from the incident with the Tiny Bronco. 

“Hn,” Heidegger grunted, and there was a sound of paper shuffling at the other end of the line, “He probably had to sign some kind of non-competition agreement when he joined the Space Program. Gonna toss this one to the lawyers and see if we can get it to go away clean.”

Reeve made a noise of assent, “Speaking of the Space Program, what will the department do in Palmer’s absence?” 

“Same as it always does,” Heidegger answered dismissively, “Limp along. It hasn’t had a project in years.” 

“Hmm,” Reeve agreed. He had been under that impression himself. Although he had no particular love of Palmer, it had been hard to watch the man petition for departmental funding quarter after quarter without success, the Shinra 26 project becoming his personal windmill to tilt at. 

A dark part of him wondered if the Shinra 26 wasn’t Palmer’s Sector 7, but he dismissed the thought quickly. The Space Program had never flooded the city slums with displaced people or necessitated emergency housing projects on the borders of the city. 

“About the Temple of the Ancients...” Reeve began, and when a ‘go on’ noise sounded across the line he continued, “Highwind said that Rufus was looking for it, and AVALANCHE was headed in the wrong direction.”

“Yeah, I think Rufus got moving on your intel before the Turks brought back full information. Don’t worry about it, keep doing what you’re doing.” 

“And was anybody going to warn me about Mukki?” 

“Mukki?” Heidegger echoed, and then roared with laughter, “Oh hell, Reeve, that’s what you left Midgar for? That guy’s really something, isn’t he?”

“That’s one way to put it.” 

“Ha! Yeah, someone should have given you a heads up. Musta forgot the guy ahead of you left so suddenly with everything else going on. Anyway, you were gonna have to deal with him eventually, it’s your department he works with.”

“Not yet, he doesn’t,” Reeve protested, “I’m meeting with his accountant later in the week to do a preliminary review of their estimates. Going to fax the documents in for my team to take a look.”

“Damnit, Reeve, just give him the contract. He’s pain in the ass but he knows how to play ball.”

Reeve cursed under his breath then paused, frowned, “Heidegger, last week when I met with Rufus, he said...” 

_Your type of people,_ was what Rufus had said – but Reeve suddenly wasn’t sure how to phrase his objection. Wasn’t sure he wanted to if he could, and subject himself to more of Heidegger’s dismissal and horrible horse laughing if the conversation went wrong. 

“Yeah?” the man prompted him over the phone line. 

“Nothing,” Reeve said, and hung up.


	19. Chapter 19

Finishing his call to the main party and dropping the Bronco’s handheld receiver back into its cradle, Cloud turned to their newest companion, “There are another five people waiting for us in Rocket Town. Will everyone be able to fit safely in the plane as it is?”

“Can’t see why not, as long as the hull holds,” Cid shrugged as he navigated the craft toward a sheltered cove near Rocket Town where the plane would be safe from the waves and harsh shoreline, “Used to carry a couple of tonnes of munitions, she’s a tough old girl.” 

When Cloud nodded and fell silent, Aeris asked, “How long have you had her?” 

“The Bronco?” Cid answered, as though there had been ambiguity, “Since after the war. All these light craft were being decommissioned after the Wutaiian disarmament. Most of ‘em used for dusting crops or carrying tourists now.” 

“Is that what you used the Bronco for?” 

“Huh?” Cid glanced over at her, “Nah. Just wasn’t ready to give up the sky. Did supply runs around the continent, sometimes, when things got slow in Rocket Town,” here, he laughed, “Which is most of the time, come to think of it. Damn shame she’s grounded now.” 

“Maybe there will be another plane while we’re looking for the Temple?” Aeris prompted him, and smiled, “I would love to fly again. Inside the plane next time, I hope.” 

“Okay lady, it’s a promise,” Cid grinned, “I’ll get you up in the sky again before we’re done.” 

Aeris gave Cait Sith’s ears a gentle tug before scratching the space behind them, clearly pleased. 

She had pulled the robot into her lap again after they slipped down from the wings of the plane and into the cockpit, and Reeve hadn’t thought of a reason to protest in light of the cat’s usual mount left standing in a back field under heavy Shinra fire. At first, it had seemed awkward (and the nervous attention she showered on the cat’s ears had not helped the situation) but the higher vantage point had allowed him to peer through the front windows of the aircraft and get a more meaningful gauge of their location than was provided by the robot’s GPS coordinates. 

“You’ll like everyone, I think,” Aeris supplied, “They’re good people.” 

“Yeah?” Cid asked, “Sounds fine.” 

Cloud grunted, then after a long pause in which the only noise what the hum of the engine and the splash of water as the plane bounced across it, started, “... Vincent...” 

“Oh,” Aeris agreed, “Yes, Vincent.” 

Cid looked between them, confused and then indifferent, turning his attention back to the expanse of water in front of them. 

“It, uh...” Cloud tried again, “When you meet Vincent, it’s best not to get him too, um, agitated.” 

“Agitated?”

“Just... try not to upset him. He’s... got a thing.” 

Cid shot a look at the man sitting beside him, “You make him sound like he’s some kind of abusive husband.” 

As soon as he said it, Cid’s face cramped, and he turned his face back to the task at hand, but Reeve saw his jaw working silently and his hands tightened on the steering, just a little less composed than he had been. 

\---

It was already past sunset in Costa del Sol when the Tiny Bronco was guided to and secured at shore, and its passengers began the inland trek to Rocket Town. Cait Sith marked the coordinates of the Bronco with his AI’s GPS, having only recently learned it was something that he could do in addition to geolocation – one of dozens of the cat’s features skipped for when they were forced into an early deployment at the Gold Saucer and reviewed on the extended boat ride from Junon. 

Earlier in the day Reeve had bowed out of an invitation to Mukki’s beach house for drinks, and although the refusal had been born entirely from the need to focus his attention on not dropping the culmination of a billion gil research project into the northern ocean, something in the tone of Mukki’s invitation had suggested that the meeting would not have been entirely professional. Reeve had been just as glad to make an excuse. 

The result however had been a push for a late meal at a local tavern that he hadn’t been able to avoid. As Cait Sith bounded through the flat expanses of pasture land north of Rocket Town, Reeve made his way down to the restaurants dotting a long boardwalk, slipping through the crowd of vacationers milling around the evening while the sound of waves lapped at the shore nearby. Unlike the people around him, Reeve felt rather like he’d had a lifetime worth of ocean already that day, but there was nothing to be done for it. 

When he found the place, nearly at the end of the boardwalk and jutting out over the waves on its own short pier, and gone inside, the noise of tourists was replaced by the sound of a crooning acoustic singer accompanied by an overenthusiastic drummer.

“Didn’t I tell you this guy was gonna show up overdressed?” Mukki said, clearly for the benefit of his entourage, when Reeve found their table by the water.

Having traded his suitcoat for a simple button down Reeve was inclined to disagree, but upon reviewing the company – now a rather larger group and comprised of a great many more brawny young men than had been present at their earlier meeting – the only dubious concession that Mukki had made to formality was the addition of a gaudily printed tropical shirt. 

“Mukki, good evening,” Reeve dropped into a chair across from the man, “I’m afraid I was under the impression that this was a business dinner.” 

“Sure it is,” Mukki agreed, waving over a waiter who had been hovering with pitchers of something with pieces of fruit floating around the top, “You’re resurrecting the Neo Midgar Project and your internal crews can’t meet the demand. Here I am with a crew and equipment ready to break ground.”

Surveying the assembled group, a collection of admittedly burly but questionably dressed men looking more ready for a rave than a construction site, Reeve couldn’t help the skepticism in his voice when he asked “... And I suppose these are your foremen?” 

Mukki frowned, “That was uncalled for.” 

“I’m sorry,” Reeve sighed and turned to one of the young men, asking, “What do you do here, sir?” 

The man laughed lightly and took a sip of his drink. 

To his displeasure, Reeve found himself thrown off balance by the situation. He suspected resentfully that it had been Mukki’s intention the entire time. 

It wasn’t that he found the behaviour at the table shameful, precisely, because he had never been ashamed of his orientation. Nevertheless, he had always preferred very much to keep his private life private and was finding the overt display at the table excessive and unnecessary. Reeve felt quite sure he would have found the entire ordeal embarrassing no matter who was involved, and not specifically because of the way Mukki was gripping the alarmingly younger man beside him. 

He directed his gaze out over the water to avoid watching as Mukki plucked the glass from the muscular youth tucked under his arm and drank before returning it. Lights from the lanterns that illuminated the deck danced across the waves as they passed underneath in a dizzying imitation of the ocean sky. 

“Tell me Reeve,” Mukki asked, drawing his attention back to the table after a pause, “I’ve been working with Urban Development for a very, very long time. Your predecessor – and I’m awfully glad to hear he’s recovering well, by the way – was a good friend of mine. How is it that I’ve never met you before?” 

“I managed International Development,” Reeve explained, “We wouldn’t have crossed paths while you worked on domestic projects.” 

It was a fair question. The previous department head had suffered a sudden massive heart attack over the summer before taking an unplanned early retirement and leaving the post unexpectedly vacant. Reeve himself wasn’t sure why he’d been selected for promotion; he never doubted that he was damn good at his job – of that he was certain – but his counterpart in the domestic division held a long tenure with the company and decades of experience over Reeve. 

“You must be very good,” Mukki replied, and his cheerfully casual air narrowed into a sharp focus that made Reeve wonder if he’d formed an oversimplified impression of the man. 

“I try to be,” Reeve answered, and finally accepted a drink passed to him by one of the young men in their periphery. It was true, too. For all he was finding the interpersonal side of his position trying, he’d worked long years becoming excellent in his field. 

Finding himself at a loss for how to deal with the contractor across from him, however, he wished in retrospect he’d spent less time keeping up with journals and more time around the water cooler absorbing company gossip before taking the reins from his predecessor. 

“Great!” Mukki slapped the table (Reeve leaned back startled, but the young man who had handed Reeve his drink nudged him for attention then rolled his eyes), “So, tell me about this project and we’ll see what we can come up with.” 

\---

While Reeve laid out preliminary requirements for the new project, relieved to learn that not all of Mukki’s entourage was ornamental and that he did in fact have a pair of civil engineers at the table, the group from the Tiny Bronco was reaching one of the old unpaved roads that criss-crossed the Rocket Plains. 

“I suppose I can’t look forward to another hot shower tonight, can I?” Aeris asked wistfully. After the first quarter hour walking through the undeveloped fields she had knotted her dress above her knees to stop it tangling in the brush, but she had still managed to accumulate an impressive collection of burrs and brambles that she brushed at as if they had committed some manner of personal betrayal. 

“Told you to get cargo pants in Nibelheim,” Cloud observed tonelessly while he watched her, and she glared at him even as she cast a minor cure spell to repair her scratched shins. 

“if we were in town yeh could grab something from Shera,” Cid said thoughtfully, “yeh look about the same size.” 

Aeris’s glare evolved into an outright scowl as she turned on him instead, “Oh yes? And I thought you were done with Shera. Was it just until you needed her again?” 

Cid twitched and looked away, fumbling for his cigarettes and giving his full attention to getting one sparked up. 

“Do you think everyone else is close already? Maybe you could borrow something from Tifa?” Cait Sith asked in the uncomfortable silence that followed, and when Aeris’s bad humour was turned on him he held up the cat’s little paws placatingly, “Sorry. I still need to get my moogle back, too, you know.” 

Aeris sighed, and nodded, “Will Shera be with them?”

After the brief and staticky conversation over the Bronco’s radio, the rest of AVALANCHE had accepted Cid’s instructions to follow the main road north out of town, but more than very basic conversation had been impossible through the limitations of their technology. 

“Nah,” Cid blew out a lungful of smoke, “She’s not the type to go against the rules. And the town’ll still be crawling with Shinra ready to enforce ‘em at this rate.”

“Will she be alright?,” Aeris asked, “We could go get her out...”

“Not me,” Cid shook his head. “Told ya I’m done with the whole town and I meant it.”

Aeris regarded him in displeasure for an extended moment, then shook her head as if to clear it and shrugged, “I’m going to scout south,” before taking off at a brisk jog away from the group on the road. 

Cloud sighed and turned to the cat, “You’ve still got your materia?”

Cait Sith nodded and held up his prop megaphone. The little cat’s crown was long gone, no doubt already sitting somewhere on the distant sea floor, but somehow the megaphone had remained intact after their strange morning and he twirled it on one finger clownishly.

“You mean it can use materia?” Cid perked up with renewed interest, eyeing the robot speculatively. 

“I tell fortunes too,” Reeve directed the little cat to say, “I’m a very advanced AI, you know.” 

Cid blew out smoke and tossed his half-finished cigarette down. Before the cat could react it was in the air in Cid’s gloved hands, being turned one way and the other with interest. 

Reeve sucked in a breath at the sudden rough handling being visited on his counterpart, and choked on his drink. He stopped sketching on the bar napkin in front of him coughed into his elbow, but even as his eyes watered noticed that Mukki was watching him with much the same too-sharp interest that Cid leveled at the cat, alerted by his sudden upset. 

“You okay, man?” the engineer (Reeve hadn’t caught his name but he had proved to be quite excellent at following plans as Reeve sketched them) seated to his right pounded him on the back a couple of times as he recovered and pushed his drink away.

“Fine,” Reeve wheezed, but even as he said it Cid was ruffling up the cat’s fur and mumbling about concealed jointing, sending the robot’s sensors into a spiral. It took a dedicated effort of will not to lean away from the phantom touch that dug into his ribs and tugged his limbs forward and back while checking their movement. 

Reeve made a conscious effort to distance himself from the Cait Sith and stay in the moment, reaching for a blank napkin to continue his drawing.

“Several of the sites we’ve surveyed showed signs of some seismic instability, we’d need to take that into consideration in the found _AHHH!_ ”

Half a continent away Cid tugged at one of the cat’s eyelids to examine the camera nested there, overwhelming Reeve’s mind’s eye with the vision of Cid Highwind approaching from close range. 

“ _Hands off_!” the cat finally managed to squeak out, and twisted out of the pilot’s grip to dodge behind Cloud’s legs. 

At the bar, Reeve looked up in the new silence, realizing he was most definitely at the center of attention. Mukki fixed him with another of his evaluating expressions. 

“I think, Reeve,” Mukki said with forced lightness, “You may have gotten a little too much sun today. How about we call it a night?” 

Reeve slumped, embarrassed but grateful for the way out, “I... think that might be best. So sorry.” 

He got to his feet, wishing the assembled group a good evening, and went to settle his tab. He didn’t think he was imagining the myriad of eyes fixed on his back as he retreated. 

As he crossed toward the bar, he let his mind slip back into his self near Rocket Town. Looking around, he realized that the entire ordeal had taken almost no time at all, for all it had felt unbearable.

Aeris must have heard him shout because she had stopped jogging ahead and was making her way back toward the group. When she was close enough she asked, “You okay Cait?” 

Cait Sith nodded to her from where he had huddled between Cloud’s boots, then craned his neck up to see the young man examining him with a perturbed expression.

“Come on, Cait,” Aeris said after the pause stretched out, “We can make sure the road is clear for the others, they had a hard day too. Is that okay Cloud?” 

The man nodded, and looked back to the cat, “Keep her safe.” 

Cait Sith dashed across the distance to join Aeris, and they picked up a brisk pace south. 

“Sorry, little guy,” Cid shouted after him before they pulled too far away, “Thought you were a robot.” 

“... I am,” Reeve called back through the cat after some deliberation, then sprinted out ahead of all of them before any follow up could be asked. 

Behind him, the cat’s sensitive hearing just picked up Cloud saying, “We’re not really sure what he is, actually. But he’s good to have around.” 

“I’m awfully sorry for the upset, Miss Aeris,” he chirped when they both were far enough ahead. 

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” Aeris told him, “He’s... he’s a little abrasive, I think. Our new friend.” 

_A little abrasive,_ was about the nicest way that Reeve could imagine putting it, thinking back to the disarray Highwind had created in the Shinra building on his visits. Undoubtedly, the man would never have held his position if he was anything less than brilliant. 

He was brilliant, though. And not bad natured, or so Reeve had thought at the time, in spite of how disruptive he had managed to be. 

“Nothing to worry about,” Cait Sith assured her, “It’s been a strange day for everyone.” 

Aeris hummed lowly, and continued her brisk walk. 

Reeve offered to tell her fortune to cheer her up but she waved him off, “Sorry, Cait... I’m more tired than I thought, I suppose.” 

Reeve wondered if it was the scare of the morning – which had certainly left him rattled – but thought it wasn’t. Aeris had given every indication of being delighted by the wild final flight of the Tiny Bronco. He suspected, instead, that the change in her demeanor had come when Cloud and Cid had begun discussing the Temple of the Ancients. 

He made a note to ask her about it again, later, when she was in a better mood. 

In Costa del Sol, finally having gotten the barman’s attention and settled his tab, Reeve exited the tavern to find one of the young men from Mukki’s entourage waiting for him on the boardwalk. 

“Reeve!” he greeted, and trotted over to fall into step beside him, “Mukki asked me to make sure you got back to your hotel alright.” 

Reeve cursed internally to think that he’d seemed so off as to require a chaperon. Aloud, he said, “That’s very courteous of you, but I assure you I’m really fine...” 

The man shrugged, but didn’t back away, “Yeah, well... Mukki asked me to. And anyway it was getting a little, umm, intense.” 

“Intense?” Reeve asked him, but the man just shrugged and offered him a lop-sided smile, so he continued, “You may find I’m a bit out of your way. Are you quite sure?” 

“Nice night for a walk,” he answered. 

With the sky clear and the sound of the ocean, Reeve had to agree that it was. 

\---

The man, an unexpectedly soft-spoken youth whose name he learned to be Dennis, was a recent graduate from an architectural program and was on vacation while waiting for an internship position to begin when he encountered the group from Midgar. As with the civil engineers back at the bar, Reeve couldn’t help wondering exactly how it was that Mukki had convinced him to join the flamboyant assemblage that appeared to make up the bulk of the man’s company. 

Arriving at his hotel, Reeve wished his companion a good night.

After an awkward moment in which the young man hovered uncertainly (Reeve suspected waiting for an invitation upstairs, but found he himself was in the mood only for sleep) he shrugged, “Well, good night then. Guess I’ll see you around.” 

“I appreciate the escort,” Reeve answered, then cringed at his own choice of words. 

Perhaps picking up on it, Dennis grinned and announced, “Hey, any time,” before wandering back into the Costa del Sol nightlife. 

Reeve sighed, and made his way up to his room. 

North of Rocket Town, Cait Sith picked up movement approaching along the road from the other direction, and focusing the cat’s sensors forward was able to discern six forms moving along the road toward them. 

He urged the little cat faster, eager to confirm the identity and verify the well-being of their missing companions. As the robot sprinted forward his focus fell first on where Barret headed the group, and felt a flush of relief begin to flutter somewhere behind his ribcage.

Beside Barret, Red XIII lifted his head and scented the air before speaking something to the rest of the group and beginning to trot ahead of the party. 

“Red!” the robot shouted when they were close enough, and the Cosmo Beast took a seat in front of him while waiting for the others to catch up, “Is everyone alright?”

“We all are well,” Red XIII nodded his powerful head, “There is a strong Shinra presence in the town, another group of infantry arrived after you all left with the plane, but they didn’t pursue us.” 

Reeve nodded through the little cat. There was no reason for Shinra to force a confrontation with AVALANCHE of course. Not while that goose still stood a chance of laying a golden egg and Cait Sith was there to report back if it happened. 

“Where’s Cloud?” Tifa asked as the larger group got close enough.

“Just behind us with Cid,” Aeris answered, catching up from the other direction, “I think they’re worried about getting too far from the plane. It’s moored about seven kilometers north.”

“Fine,” Barret acknowledged, “We can take our time, though. Shinra’s all bark today. After Palmer got taken away the most trouble we had was with the hotel check out. And getting this big ol’ beast moving in the right direction.” 

Reeve followed Barret’s gesture to where the moogle trailed behind them, loaded down with gear again.

“Thanks!” Cait Sith chirped, “It’s programmed to work from my voice commands, but my megaphone doesn’t work so well long distance...”

“Still saved us some heavy lifting,” Barret shrugged, then crouched to grab the cat around the middle and deposit it among the gear on top of its mount. The flutter behind Reeve’s ribs made a second appearance as the phantom sensation wrapped his torso in Costa del Sol, and he wondered if the drinks at the bar had been stronger than he thought. 

“Looks like you lost your crown, though,” Barret observed, ruffling the fur on the cat’s head before turning away. 

Reeve touched lightly at the spot of sensation left behind through the neural link, considering the warm feeling in its wake.

Definitely, it was the drinks.

With the entire group back together not long after Cloud announced they would make camp upon arriving back at the Bronco, but Reeve had already moved to his bed in Costa del Sol, his little avatar sprawling across the moogle to affect dozing in symmetry with its controller.


	20. Chapter 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter begins the second notable (?) departure from the game canon, in that it requires some creative reimagining of the littoral areas of the world map. You’ve been notified ;)

It had been the small hours of the morning in Costa del Sol by the time AVALANCHE made it to the small cove where the Bronco was moored, and Reeve had barely stirred to peer through the cat at the group making camp for the night before he dropped back into sleep. 

When he woke to his morning alarm in his hotel room and automatically checked on the status of Cait Sith, only Tifa and Aeris were to be seen among the tents, seated shoulder to shoulder in front of the tiny campfire and speaking in low voices. 

In spite of her initial protest Aeris had finally borrowed suitable hiking gear from Tifa (“God I wish I had your hips, I look like a boy when I wear pants.” she had complained after changing, and Tifa had laughed and blushed, “You really don’t.” Reeve felt inclined to agree – although the young woman was naturally slight, there was something about her that made her seem more solid, more _present_ than the rest of her companions) and the young women looked well paired in the predawn cool by the ocean. Although unable to pick up all of their conversation over the sound of waves, Reeve thought it was the first time he had seen Aeris calm since the Temple of the Ancients was mentioned the day before, and it felt somehow wrong to intrude on their quiet exchange. 

Reeve set the cat back to its idle state and started booting his portable computer while he waited for room service. His inbox, when the modem was finished dinging and chiming the connection, contained a handful of updates from his department managers and one very fervent e-mail from Palmer regarding the condition and location of the Tiny Bronco. 

He answered the message with a succinct wish for the man’s speedy recovery, and the news that the Bronco would not be worth recovering in its newly grounded condition. He considered adding that it was in fact Palmer’s people who shot the thing down in the first place, but supposed the man was suffering enough already without antagonizing him. 

Inbox dealt with and necessary documents prepared for the morning meeting with Mukki, he let himself drift back into the cat to watch the sun rise over the ocean.

\---

Prepared to spend the morning doing a review of the upcoming NeoMidgar project (already a nightmare to be managing the damn thing so far from his office and his people) Reeve found himself derailed again upon discovering that Mukki, in addition to his fondness for staying out late on the Costa del Sol terraces, also enjoyed arriving early at its golf courses. Instead of finding the contractor waiting in the hotel restaurant as he expected, a driver appeared to transport him to one of the more exclusive local clubs. 

In spite of liking golf perfectly well, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was losing a pissing contest he hadn’t realized he had entered.

As the driver cruised through the bright streets of the resort town, Reeve sent his attention to AVALANCHE. 

On the beach, Yuffie was up and insisting that with the new transport, the best thing was to continue heading west, but was meeting resistance. 

“Rufus said we were going the wrong way,” Cloud shook his head, “There’s no reason to keep moving in the same direction.” 

“How would you know?” Yuffie huffed, “He’s not even on our _side_ , why are you gonna listen to him instead of me?” 

Cloud shot a glance around the rest of the group at that, his gaze finally stopping on Barret who gave a slight nod. 

If Reeve hadn’t already believed that they shared his suspicions about the teenager, he might have missed it. As it was, there was little ambiguity about where she really wanted to go that was in the west. Although if she did have some ulterior motive with the group, Reeve figured, he was hardly one to judge. 

It was with mixed feelings all around that the group finally loaded into the plane that morning for a trip east. Cait Sith made it to the cabin balanced on the top of his moogle, which afterwards sat wetly in the back of the storage compartment, dripping into some old packing blankets. 

Less graceful about the boarding process was Red XIII, who exhibited every inch of a cat’s aversion to water, and who upon finally making the long leap from the shore to the plane skidded on the water slick metal wing and soaked his back end before regaining his footing, yowling indignantly as he did. 

“Gonna halfta modify the loading gear,” Cid had conceded as he watched the procession, his own leap from the shoreline to the plane’s long tail surprisingly more graceful and less soggy than was managed by the bulk of the party. 

Damp though it was, the comfortably cool belly of the Bronco turned out to be a welcome relief after days spent on foot. 

\---

“I’m not reading that,” Mukki said regarding to the documents Reeve unpacked while they waited for tee time, “We’re on _vacation_.”

But in spite of Mukki’s recalcitrance regarding the paperwork, Golf was not the disaster Reeve had foreseen when the driver arrived that morning and disabused him of ideas about a formal meeting. The game turned out to be blissfully uninterrupted by Cait Sith (the cat cozily nestled in a drier pile of packing blankets than his moogle), and while Mukki seemed categorically opposed to doing any work on the working vacation his manner was less excessive than it had been at their last two meetings. 

When Reeve brought out financial documents again in the club house later, Mukki sighed and grabbed him by both shoulders.

“Reeve,” the man said with placating reasonableness, “You’re the boss now. We’ve got people in Midgar taking care of the numbers. You and I – we have a _relationship_.”

The over familiarity put Reeve’s teeth on edge, feeling again like some critical power relationship was tipping out of his favour. He stepped out of the hold on his shoulders. 

“I appreciate your confidence, Mr. Mukki,” he said finally, “but nothing you’ve said so far tells me whether you’re equipped to handle a project of this scale. We’re going to need to sit down at some point –”

He was interrupted by Mukki letting out a bellowing laugh and stepping back into his space, wrapping an arm around his shoulders and shepherding him to join a group on the patio. 

“Man, you just don’t know how to take a day off,” Mukki informed him, “You’re a weird guy Reeve. But I like you.”

When Reeve failed to be mollified, Mukki continued, “Our companies have been working together for a very long time. My people know what Shinra wants. And if we don’t have it, we know where to get it. Just relax and let our teams take care of it.” 

Although not convinced, he allowed himself to be lead to the table where Mukki’s associates were already gathered, and didn’t bring up business again that afternoon. 

\---

AVALANCHE’s movement east began going poorly when they were reminded that Yuffie’s motion sickness in the buggy couldn’t hold a candle to the violence of her seasickness. 

To the background of Cid shouting that no one had better throw up in his baby, Cloud had called a halt to their progress. With the engines cut and the plane lurching to a standstill he popped open the side hatch, and after a moment spent glancing around the outside of the vehicle went to pull Yuffie to her feet and toward the hatch. 

“Whoa, no, what?” the girl groaned, resisting him even as she clutched her stomach, dragging her heels, “What are you doing? I’m not going out there.” 

“Yes you are,” Cloud told her, “Come on, you need to feel better or this isn’t going to work.” 

“I feel better inside,” Yuffie protested with a sickening _urp_ of dyspepsia. 

Cloud ignored her and climbed out the front hatch, physically dragging her after him while she shouted, “Don’t drop me in the water!”

“... Not gonna drop you,” was the last thing Cait Sith’s sensors picked out from the conversation as it blended into the sound of the waves outside the plane. 

Reeve himself had been fighting motion sickness – with greater success, or possibly just with greater experience – than Yuffie for most of the time the Bronco was in motion. Unlike the teenager however, he had enjoyed the option of distancing himself from the little cat in order to fight the equilibrial dissonance. 

Cait Sith hopped from the blanket nest Aeris had thoughtfully prepared for him and dashed to the front of the plane to peer out at where Cloud and Yuffie stood on the wing. The teenager continued to clutch at her stomach, looking positively green while Cloud braced her shoulders. 

As Reeve spied through his borrowed eyes, Cloud released one of her shoulders and began walking back toword the central cabin. Yuffie flailed with both arms and grabbed onto him while her boots slipped on the metal wing. 

In a fluid motion, Cloud’s grip shifted from her shoulder to around her waist. Stabilized, he began walking again, slow and surefooted. 

The metallic clanking of their footsteps resonated inside the Bronco as the pair walked across the wings over the cabin, one pair confident and even and the other in an irregular sliding and skipping staccato.

When they passed onward to the other wing, Cid shook his head, “I’ll be goddamned. Spike’s really something, ain’t he?” 

Joining the chorus of assent from the remainder of the team, Reeve found that his agreement wasn’t just a matter of making the cat a good fit. Watching Cloud up on top of the plane, half carrying the teenager back and forth as she lurched along but never losing patience or gentleness, Reeve could understand why half the team was half in love with the former SOLDIER for all he sometimes was cold.

Turning the cat’s attention back to the inside of the plane, he found his attention drawn to and remaining on Barret where the man sat leaning against the hull of the Bronco, looking unusually peaceful with the massive gun arm resting on one knee. 

Barret was turning out to be a problem, Reeve was prepared to admit to himself, on a personal level in addition to a professional one. He didn’t lack so much self-awareness as not to recognize that he was developing (and god help him, at thirty-five years old and on the executive of the world’s biggest corporation) a crush on the brash and dynamic former leader of AVALANCHE. 

It was irrational, of course, for reasons starting with the terror attacks against the Midgar reactors and ending with their only interactions happening through a robotic spy cat. He could only imagine the man’s horror at discovering Reeve’s further indiscretion of developing a personal interest on top of the inherent betrayal of his presence in the group. 

“You’re a damn fool, Reeve,” he told himself jovially in the privacy of his hotel suite, pinching the bridge of his nose in the face of an oncoming headache. 

It was surely just a product of job stress, he told himself, the long and strange hours and the desire for some kind of escapism. 

Clearly it was just a brief lapse of reason. Temporary insanity. An oncoming nervous breakdown. Something that came out of long hours and loneliness and that needed to be stopped and put in order as quickly as possible. Probably just a case of time and proximity, living in one another’s pockets the way AVALANCHE did, and all of them living inside Reeve’s head through his neural link to the cat. 

Combined with all the extra hours he had spent with the group on his long boat ride from Junon and supplemented by the excesses of Mukki’s entourage, anyone would have started getting strange ideas. 

Maybe, he supposed, if he was an actual member of AVALANCHE and really there with the group – 

“Definitely a nervous breakdown,” Reeve scolded himself, and turned his focus back to his computer. There was a new e-mail from the medical team, cloaked as it usually was in euphemism when regarding the classified Cait Sith project, mentioning a check in when he got back to Midgar the following week, and that Hojo had finally been in in touch. 

Being honest with himself, his personal investment in the missing department head lessened after he had caught up on some sleep and his headaches had begun to ease, and the reminder was jarring. Thoughts of the things seen since then, the horrors shared by Vincent when he joined their party, left a sick feeling in Reeve’s gut when he thought too closely about one of Hojo’s experiments riding around in his own brain. 

With a sigh, he forwarded the relevant parts of the message to his assistant with a request to set an appointment. 

\---

“We’re not gonna get anywhere if we have to keep stopping like this,” Cid announced later in the day, after Cloud had taken Yuffie out on the wings for the third time to ward off her illness. 

“What’s the alternative?” Cloud asked, his voice suggesting that he really didn’t want to hear it if there wasn’t one. 

Cid reached for his cigarettes then peered into the pack with displeasure and putting it away, “Port to the east. They see a lot of seaplanes. Got a buddy there that can prob’ly hook us up with a retrofit faster than I can do anything without my workshop. If we get her more stable I suppose we’re all gonna be happier.” 

Cloud grunted an agreement, then asked “Costa del Sol?” and when Cid nodded, “We came through on our way from Junon.” 

“It was too hot,” Red XIII added, lifting his head from where it had rested heavily in Aeris’s lap while she braided his mane, “I got a sunburn on my nose.” 

It was hard to take his grievance seriously with a half-finished braid bobbling back and forth between his flicking ears, but Reeve had the added benefit of Cait Sith’s programming to help him keep a straight face. 

“How long until we get there?” the robot asked, the limits of its programed voice again affording Reeve the ability to hide his dismay at their new heading. 

“Two days, maybe three at the current speed. Depends on the weather and the sea,” Cid answered, his attention already back on the Bronco. 

“Oh,” the cat agreed, “That’s good,” although Reeve found himself to be of very much the opposite opinion. 

Reeve spent the remainder of his evening checking weather forecasts and his itinerary for the next few days with growing uneasiness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now with [amazing illustrations](https://twitter.com/mabs_art/status/1352393723418533892) by the lovely and talented Mabs! (I'm so blown away by this! Everyone needs to go check out her Barret/Reeve art and comics immediately!)


	21. Chapter 21

It was with a sense of unease that Reeve tracked the progress of AVALANCHE on their eastward journey toward Costa del Sol. 

While his week in Costa del Sol as a Shinra executive had continued on uneventfully (broken by one trying dinner with Mukki, during which Cid had taken upon himself to test and stretch the articulation of the robot’s mechanical hands in contrast to Vincent’s clawed one by the campfire one evening), his concerns regarding an encounter with AVALANCHE kept him awake late into the night in spite of the luxurious suite the company had provided for him. 

Those nights, already thrilling with nervous energy, he used to go running through dunes and across oceanside cliffs with Red XIII, never seeming to miss the lost sleep until his alarm sounded the next morning. Vincent joined them on the second night out, sweeping along beside in a blur of limbs and cape that confused the robot’s sensors and that Reeve tried not to think about too closely. 

In spite of his growing anxiety about the group’s destination, he began to find himself enjoying the time traveling in the Bronco more than he enjoyed his days in the oceanside resort town. The nighttime runs when they made camp, the brilliant light of the moon undiluted by Midgar pollution or Costa del Sol revelers turned the world through the cat’s eyes a shining grey scale broken only by the flare of Red XIII’s tail like a beacon ahead of him; the long days leaving the cat unobtrusively half-idle while the group dozed in the plane’s cabin. 

Yuffie’s motion sickness had eased the second day when Cid had finally hauled her into the cockpit and begun teaching her the control and navigation of the Bronco. Some combination of the view through the front canopy and the control over the craft’s motion worked to settle her stomach, to the relief of everyone present. It also allowed them to make better time, slicing through the kilometers to their destination with startling efficiency. 

Reeve’s growing concerns about crossing paths with AVALANCHE directly were brought to the forefront the day before his departure back to Midgar, when the cat’s GPS signalled a proximity alarm from fifty kilometers out at around the same time he was wrapping up a round of golf with the civil engineers he’s met on the first night. 

The brief relief he had experienced that morning to learn that the engineers were far more amenable to talking about business than their employer finally evaporated completely when he shifted his focus to the cat in time to see the Tiny Bronco weaving and wobbling its way toward the public marina used by the city’s many tourists. 

Following an impulse to phone in the arrival to Public Security – or at any rate to get nearer to the center of town in the event that he had to – he excused himself from an afternoon at the clubhouse and called a driver back to his hotel.

\---

Yuffie let out a whoop when the plane coasted into the docks and knocked gently against a buoy left there as a bumper, dropping the controls to toss her hands up in victory, and causing Cid to make a mad grab for them in reflex. 

Her enthusiasm for the plane waned when the team began to disembarked into the tropical heat of the vacation destination, and in spite of Cid’s insistence that part of piloting the craft was dealing with the paperwork of parking it she disappeared into the crowd in a matter of minutes with a shouted explanation about buying new materia. 

Thus abandoned, Cid and Cloud went in search of the marina’s office, with Aeris following after a moment’s hesitation. 

The last out of the vehicle as he tried to work out a trajectory for the moogle to hop from the floating plane to the floating docks, Cait Sith was able to observe the way that Vincent hesitated between the group headed for the office and the one that remained discussing where to find lodgings for the week. 

Reeve supposed that being thrown, for all intents and purposes, suddenly thirty years into the future with no guidebook would have left anyone feeling adrift, but even so it was hard to watch the man shifting with discomfort without a job to do. His fluttering crimson cloak, glaringly bright under the Costa del Sol sun, only drew attention to his discomfort. 

Apparently also noticing, Tifa stepped out to link her arm through his, “Come on Vincent, we’re gonna find a place with air conditioning for Red. Help us find a good deal.” 

The former Turk tensed, then nodded, and allowed himself to be led toward the shore following after Red XIII. 

“Okay, cat?” Barret asked when the moogle finally made its calculated leap onto the floating structure of the docks and the robot scrambled on top. 

“Dandy!” the cat chirped in response, allowing Barret to lean past him and close up the Bronco’s hatch before jogging to catch up with Tifa and Vincent. He slung his arm around the man’s shoulders when he did, seemingly oblivious to the way the floating walkways dipped under their combined weight. 

Watching from behind as the man in the red cape, so adrift a few moments before, was enveloped in the unfiltered welcome of the group, Reeve found himself wondering again about how AVALANCHE had come together. He himself was of course there on orders. Yuffie clearly had some ulterior motive, probably involving technology or materia. And as he had been present for the arrival of Cid he knew that to have more to do with alienation from the Shinra Space Department. 

The arrival of the Turk, however... Reeve thought back to all the work he had read on indoctrination, on radicalization to extremist groups. It didn’t seem to quite fit the picture in front of him. All the elements were there – the marginalized individual, the group with a cause, an ideology proposing answers... but something about it didn’t feel quite right. 

The laughter and teasing from Barret and Tifa that drifted back to Cait Sith’s sensors above the sound of the waves was genuine, not instrumental. After weeks travelling together, he wasn’t able to see their effort to include Vincent as anything but genuine interest in the man, the same interest that they extended to the rest of the people around them. 

As they made their way up from the docks in search of a hotel advertising both “air conditioning” and “vacancy”, Reeve considered how, through the eyes of the cat, the resort town felt so much more welcoming when there with friends. 

Then, he wondered when he lost his mind and began to think of the insurgent group as friends. 

\---

By the time the car had arrived for Reeve at the club he’d been joined by several young men from Mukki’s entourage who’d had their fill of golf and were headed for the town center and then the beach. 

Dropped near his hotel along with the larger than expected company, he wasn’t keeping the close watch on Cait Sith that he might have been. So when he exited the dark cool of the car into blinding midday sun of Costa del Sol he didn’t immediately register, and then mistook for a quirk of the neural link, the group walking across the square opposite from his hotel. 

When the reality became clear – that his view of AVALANCHE through the cat was from its perch trailing behind the group on their way through town hadn’t altered – he froze on his feet in a moment of strange non-reality. The noise of the rowdy crowd from the country club faded out of his awareness in favor of staring across the square. 

First Barret, a full head taller than most of the crowd around him, his stature and bearing making him seem every part the surreal and larger than life action star in person that he did through the eyes of the cat. 

Heart suddenly hammering, Reeve forced his gaze to move and take in the rest of the group – Tifa, petite and powerful where she seemed so much larger than Reeve’s tiny avatar. The red flash of Vincent in the middle of the group. Out ahead Red XIII cut a path through a crowd that didn’t seem to know what to make of the Cosmo Beast and offered him a wide wake, the ripple of constrained power within him so much more immediate and intimidating in person that it sent a shiver through Reeve as before a large predator. 

Behind the group, he saw the toy cat riding on a moogle. 

He had seen the Cait Sith before, or course. Prototype after prototype through the lab as they worked on functionality of the robot and the AI system to run it, endless blueprints and spec sheets until they blurred together in his memory. Hundreds of hours of training to control the movement of the cat, to make a mental map letting him control it as intuitively as his own body. But the final product in action? That had been deployed months ahead of schedule to be in the path of AVALANCHE when they arrived at the Gold Saucer. 

It was... uncanny, to see it there. After living half inside it for weeks on end and everything that the vicarious experience of the cat had imprinted on him, it was almost impossible to reconcile the image of it from the outside with his experience of it. 

“... Reeve? Hey, Reeve. _Reeve!_ ” one of the men from the vehicle had grabbed his arm to get his attention, and had begun shaking him while he was mesmerized by the group across the square. 

He turned to the man and smiled with forced casualness, “Sorry, just the sun I guess.”

Through the link Cait Sith’s sensors alerted him to shouting nearby, and with the little cat looked up to see – himself. 

And to see himself seeing himself. 

Seeing himself and seeing himself and seeing himself and seeing himself and seeing himself –

“Hey is that guy okay!?” he heard Tifa’s voice in his ears and through his mind even as the world started fading in front of his eyes. 

“He’s got friends with him,” Barret’s deep rumble answered her, “Probably just too much sun or someth – cat? You okay?” 

“Cait!” 

\--- 

Reeve woke to what felt like an ice pick being driven through the side of his skull and the vague impression that someone was moving around in his periphery. 

“Hey, you awake?” 

He cracked an eye open and winced at the surprising brightness of a beside lamp, recognizing it after a moment as the one in his hotel suite. 

“Had a hell of a time getting you up here. Doc’s come and gone, said it’s probably just a bit of heat stroke but you’d cooled down by the time he got here. How do you feel?” 

“What?” Reeve blinked, trying to process the rapid-fire account. His head felt thick and fuzzy. 

“Reeve? You okay?” 

He forced himself to focus on the person beside him, and after a moment realized it was the same young architect he had met the first day in Costa del Sol, seated in one of the suite’s plush chairs pulled up beside the bed, “Daniel?” 

“Dennis,” he corrected, “But I’ll forgive you under the circumstances.” 

As if prompted by Reeve waking up the man jumped to his feet and pulled a towel from a wide bowl at the bedside, wringing it and moving to replace the one Reeve realized was already laid across his forehead. 

“What are you doing?” he tried to grab the man’s arm as he went by but missed his target as the world swam out of focus. The cool cloth dropping onto his forehead provided more of a relief than he expected. 

“Ah, the doc said it was good to get you cooled down... And, uh, they do it on tv.” 

_Of course they do_ , Reeve sighed and struggled to sit up through the fog in his pounding head. The sky outside the window was dark. 

“How long was I out?” 

“A couple of hours,” Dennis answered, “The rest of the guys went down to the beach after the doc gave you the all clear, but I didn’t want to leave you alone.” 

“Thanks,” Reeve acknowledged, “Didn’t have to leave your friends though, I’m fine.” 

Dennis laughed, and when the flare of annoyance that caused passed Reeve had to admit to himself that he’d have reacted the same, positions reversed. He grabbed the towel from his forehead before it fell as he swung his legs over the side of the bed, dropping it back into the bowl by the bedside. 

“I don’t mind,” the young man said after a pause, “Anyway, you had a bunch of urban planning journals laying around. Did you know you have to _pay_ for these after you graduate?” 

Reeve barked a surprised laugh in spite of himself, “Yes, in fact, I was aware. Get yourself a good position and you can file them as a business expense.” 

“Good tip,” Dennis grinned, “That’s a heck of a scar on your head, by the way. Didn’t notice it when we met but with the towels and everything... how the hell did you get something like that?” 

Reeve avoided flinching only due to the lingering disorientation of his blackout. It was the first time he had been confronted about it directly, outside of the Shinra labs where it had happened. He’d taken a long leave of absence to heal after the surgery and while he was training on the first Cait Sith models. Long enough that he’d been able to brush his hair over the long thin line marking the implant, provided no one was looking for it. 

“Car accident,” he answered automatically, grateful to have a cover story for _something_ at least, “When I was a teenager, it’s fine now.”

“Geez and it still looks like that? You’re lucky you didn’t lose your head.” 

“You have no idea.” 

Reeve got to his feet, wobbling a moment but waving off help when the man beside him reached out, and realized after patting for it fruitlessly that his breast pocket was missing. He frowned to notice that he was down to his undershirt and slacks, and turned to Dennis for an explanation. 

“Your stuff is in the main room,” Dennis supplied, intuiting his question, “We wanted to get you cooled off as fast as possible. Some of the guys wanted to put you in the tub but you weren’t that hot anyway and the doc said you were gonna be fine. Sorry about that.” 

“It’s fine,” Reeve answered absently, and began making his way to the door, less to check on the condition of his missing clothing as to get a moment of space to check in on Cait Sith. 

“Hey, you’re in pretty good shape, for a bureaucrat,” Dennis called after him, “Didn’t think you were hiding muscles under the suit.” 

_For a bureaucrat?_ Reeve frowned, “Thanks... I think.” 

He slipped out before the young man could say anything else and let his mind drift away and into the cat. 

With a sickening lurch the connection took him into awareness of another dark hotel room, presumably somewhere nearby in the city. A quick scan of the room showed it to be predictably cramped for the number of people it was intended to hold (he felt a sudden wild impulse to wire some cash to his cat self then wondered if he had suffered actual neurological damage, thinking about sending funds to an anti-Shinra terrorist cell). 

Since he had last been aware of the link, the cat and its mount had been brought in and propped in a corner of the room, Barret and Red XIII the room’s only other occupants in spite of the piles of gear.

He pushed his consciousness through the link to test the state of the robot’s AI, and discovered it responding well to his directions, executing a long cat stretch then spinning on top of the moogle. 

Red XIII was the first to notice the movement, jumping down from where he lounged on one of the beds and padding over to the moogle. 

“Cait Sith, are you well?”

“I was out for a bit, what happened?” Reeve asked through the robot. 

“Damn, cat, you scared the hell out of us is what happened,” Barret answered before Red XIII was able to, “Made all kinds of noises then just stopped answering. What was that about?”

“Sorry,” the cat answered, chastened, and Reeve wished desperately that he could know exactly what kinds of noises the cat had made, and if he needed to make a cover story for any of them, “Minor crash. All booted back to normal now!” 

“Yeah, that’s what Cid figured,” Barret answered, “Thought it was that or some water got in your circuits, but we couldn’t do anything about that. You really okay?”

The cat nodded, “All systems seem fine! ...thanks for bringing my moogle.” 

“Have some practice now getting the thing moving without you,” Barret answered, then reached out to ruffle the cat’s fur affectionately, “Don’t scare us like that again, okay?” 

Possibly still groggy, possibly half mad – he wouldn’t be sure when he thought of it later – Reeve let the cat turn into Barret’s touch, resting its face against the man’s warm palm. The phantom feeling that filtered through the link acted as a balm on his frayed nerves. 

Realizing his mistake all at once when Barret chuckled and scratched under the little robot’s chin, Reeve pulled his avatar away, spinning it a few more times on the moogle’s head before settling down into an embarrassed cat loaf, “Where is everyone else?” 

Barret retreated to sit on one of the hotel beds while he answered, “Tifa’s out looking for information with Cloud and Aeris – they’re down at the beach somewhere – and Vincent said he’s gonna stay with Cid and the Bronco. I think the crowd here is too much for the poor guy after everything.” 

Reeve suspected it was more than just that, thinking of the way that the shell shocked former Turk had slipped into Cid’s shadow at some point over the past days and stayed there since, proving wrong all whispered assumptions that Cid’s attitude and temper would unbalance whatever demons Vincent was carrying with him.

_Well, there’s no predicting some things._

“It’s very hot in this town,” Red XIII supplemented, “I like the air conditioning very much, but the plane is pleasantly cool as well.” 

Struck with inspiration at the opening, Reeve had the cat answer, “The heat might be why I crashed earlier. I should probably stay out of the sun while I’m running diagnostics.” 

It would give Reeve enough time to get on his boat out of town before he risked running into the Cait Sith again. 

“I think that would be wise,” Red XIII agreed, “It was... unsettling to see you unwell earlier.” 

Touched, and a little ashamed to have earned their worry in light of his role in the group, Cait Sith said nothing but curled into a tighter ball on his mount. 

\---

“You ought to get yourself some cooler clothes for the rest of your stay,” Dennis suggested when Reeve wandered back into the bedroom, assured that his robot avatar was secure. 

“I’m really okay,” Reeve answered, trying as inconspicuously as possible to check that his documents and computer were undisturbed and nothing about the Cait Sith project had been uncovered by mistake. 

“You’re not,” Dennis snorted. The architect was still curled in the chair with a journal in his lap, and Reeve was arriving at two unsettling conclusions very quickly. 

The first was that he would certainly have to modify his wardrobe or else be seen as an unreasonable ass after the events of the afternoon had – fortunately – been attributed to the heat. 

The second was that the man seated in the chair across the room was attracted to him. For reasons he couldn’t fathom, in light of the fantastically bizarre way he had behaved all week while managing Cait Sith.

He wondered how little time it had been since the interest of the eager and attractive young man would have appealed to more than just his ego. 

He sighed.

“I’ll call the concierge and have them send me something for the next couple of days,” when Dennis looked mollified he added, “Now, I’ll have to ask you to excuse me for the evening, I seem to have missed a significant part of the work day...” 

The man across from him frowned but unfolded from the chair. After an awkward moment in which he seemed to be coming to some internal conclusion, he said, “Alright Mr. Bigshot Executive, get back to work. But I’m taking your journals. You’re going to have to have lunch with me tomorrow if you want them back.” 

Reeve withheld a laugh at the young man’s audacity, and couldn’t think of any realistic reason why he shouldn’t agree, “That sounds good in fact, I’ll speak with you tomorrow.” 

“You’d better,” Dennis told him, leaning past him to scribble a phone number on a notepad before heading for the door.

As he was about to leave, Reeve had a thought. 

“Dennis?”

“Yes?” 

“Keep the journals.” 

“... Thanks. I will.” 

\---

Palmer called that night, somewhere past midnight, shocking Reeve out of sleep with the thought that something had happened to Cait Sith before realizing the sound was coming from inside his hotel room. 

Already annoyed with a series of emails about the Bronco, the disregard for time zones left him short tempered and impatient (Reeve had become less diligent about answering his fellow executive’s messages when they surpassed three a day, and was beginning to agree with Heidegger’s evaluation that the man didn’t have nearly enough real work to do).

“Do you know how many connections I needed to make to find you?” Palmer complained, oblivious to Reeve’s estimation that the answer was surely ‘not enough’. He made noises of acknowledgement through Palmer’s grievances, “What’s going on with the Bronco? Is it in for repairs? Will it fly? It’s Shinra property, you know. AVALANCHE can’t just take it. Are they headed for the Temple of the Ancients? They’ll need the Keystone, you know. It’s missing. We found the Temple – us, the Space Program! – we found the Temple years ago, but it’s not a damn bit of good without the Keystone.”

_Keystone?_

“Look Palmer,” Reeve finally interrupted him, “It’s awfully good to hear from you up and around after everything, but it’s past midnight here and...”

“Oh! Of course!” Palmer sounded genuinely apologetic, and Reeve’s annoyance abated some small bit. He still hung up the phone harder than necessary a few moments later after the man made his stuttering goodbyes. 

“ _Damnit,_ ” Reeve swore at the empty room, not directed at anything as much as everything, and tried to fall back asleep.


	22. Chapter 22

“Damn Reeve, I thought you were gonna wear something _cool_ ,” Dennis greeted him when he arrived downtown. 

After some consideration in the morning, Reeve had finally dialed Dennis’s number and agreed to meet him for lunch. 

Arriving at the specified pub he was surprised to find himself being folded into a group of Mukki’s young attachés crowded around pool tables in the middle of a rowdy game, and was torn between feeling jilted that he had misread the young architect’s intentions and grateful that he wouldn’t need to find a way to unentangle himself before heading back to Midgar. 

“I’m afraid I left it to the discretion of the hotel staff,” Reeve admitted, watching with amusement as one of the young men chalked ‘Shinra Dude’ into the game queue on the side wall. After his request for a shopper the night before, the hotel staff had that morning delivered some questionably tasteful tropical themed shirts along with his dry cleaning. 

“Might as well own it,” Dennis opined, and before Reeve could ask what he meant the man had pulled a pair of sunglasses from the collar of his shirt and was placing them on Reeve’s face, ignoring the hand that tried to wave them away. The overly tactile nature of the younger man left him feeling vaguely unsettled, but as it didn’t seem out of place in the boisterous crowd let it go unremarked and didn’t remove the glasses. 

“How did you all end up... working... with Mukki?” Reeve asked them once a new game had started. He watched one of the men rack the balls with an elaborate flourish and realized that he’d have to think hard back to his days partying as an undergraduate if he wanted to keep up when his turn arrived. 

Dennis answered, leaning against the wall beside him with a small shrug, “Some of the guys _do_ work for him back in Midgar. He’s always bankrolling some big party out at his beach house... He’s a lot to take in, but he’d not a bad guy.” 

Reeve hummed in agreement. He was beginning to form the same impression – for all the man frustrated his efforts to get any concrete work done. 

It was during his game later (surprised to find himself having a good time with the assembled crowd and undistracted by the robot left ‘running diagnostics’ at the hotel across town), while he was trying to remember a trick shot he’d practiced through college, that everything started to go wrong.

Without Cait Sith to warn him about the movements of AVALANCHE, he was unprepared when he glanced toward the door and saw familiar figures entering. 

First Aeris. It took him a moment to recognize her half hidden under a board sun hat and one of the beach wraps that he’d seen women wearing around the tourist areas, but it was undeniably her. 

And then...

An angry noise of abused felt accompanied a jolt up his arm as he scratched the shot, glancing back only briefly to see the white ball careening into a corner pocket before his head snapped back to the door. 

Barret was huge in the small pub, suddenly the focus of all attention just by virtue of appearing, and Reeve was distantly grateful to realize he was not the only one staring. 

In the dim light inside the pub Barret was all broad muscle and shadow-sharp features. The room filled with a hushed buzz that took in the massive gun attached to the man’s arm and the grim expression that Reeve himself would have believed, if he hadn’t just the night before experienced the warmth of the man’s concern through his other self. 

“Hey, you still with us Reeve?”

“Huh?” 

“That guy’s really something, huh?” Dennis laughed beside him, but Reeve didn’t turn when he said, “Gotta get off the table though, man, you scratched your turn.” 

“I. Oh, sorry,” he backed away from the table absentmindedly as his eyes stayed on Barret, running across the man and trying to memorize his presence in person and not just as an impression sent to him through the cat. Suddenly aware that he was drawing attention he added, “I think I know him.” 

“Just think?” another of the men answered, “Damn, I’d remember somebody like that...” 

But Reeve wasn’t listening any more, passing off his cue to someone in the crowd and making his way across the room. 

At the bar, Aeris had blended in and was chatting with some tourists in exactly the easy way that Barret obviously wasn’t, the bar stools next to the one he chose becoming conspicuously vacant as he placed the massive gun arm casually across the bar. 

Not fully planning to do it but unable to help himself, Reeve crossed the room and slipped into one of the recently vacated bar stools beside the painfully familiar stranger. 

He wasn’t sure what he was hoping for, exactly. Not recognition, certainly – that kind of thinking would have been a ridiculous hope with a disastrous outcome. Proximity, possibly – close enough that their shoulders brushed as Reeve slipped into the seat, close enough to see the mild surprise appear in the man’s dark eyes when he turned to watch Reeve settling in next to him. 

The foolish thing he was doing only fully occurred to him when their eyes locked, or near enough to (Reeve realized distantly he was still safely hidden behind Dennis’s sunglasses, and he was briefly wildly grateful that the young man had imposed the disguise on him however unintentionally). If he were to be recognized as Cait Sith it would be bad enough, but remembering too late Barret’s furious reaction when they had encountered Scarlet and Tseng in Gongaga he knew it could be equally dangerous to be recognized as the head of Shinra’s Urban Planning department. 

“Can I buy you a beer?” he asked, not waiting for an answer before signaling to the bartender to bring drinks over. 

When he glanced back Barret was frowning at him, his expression not hostile as much as appraising, and Reeve felt a sudden terrible moment of exposure. It had been so easy to forget, from the vantage of friendship behind the guise of Cait Sith, that he was dealing with the strategic mind that had outwitted all of Shinra’s best security mechanisms to orchestrate the attacks against the Midgar reactors. 

“Do I know you?” Barret asked him finally.

Drawing inspiration from the group he’d left behind a moment before, Reeve answered, “I don’t think so. I’d _definitely_ remember meeting _you_.” 

Barret answered with a short huff of laughter, but accepted it when the bartender slid two open bottles of beer in front of them. 

“Huh, thought you looked familiar,” the bigger man shrugged, and Reeve tried to think if he’d been in any Shinra publicity material recently, if his face had been on anything that would give him away. Nothing sprang to mind, but that wasn’t a guarantee. He hoped, if anything, that the recollection was of the unfortunate encounter in front of the hotel the day before. 

“Afraid not,” Reeve tipped his bottle toward the man beside him, and when Barret obligingly clinked the neck of his own bottle against it the sound rang like fragile crystal through Reeve’s nerves, “You local or just passing through?” 

“Passin’ through,” Barret answered, and when he shot a questioning look sideways Reeve nodded. 

“Same. Headed for Junon in a couple of days.” 

Reeve took a long swallow of his beer to buy a moment of time and steady his nerves, struck by a sudden thrill of hyper awareness – the condensation forming on the bottle gathering against his lower lip and preoccupying his senses. He glanced to the side to see if Barret was experiencing the same effect, staring at the man’s lip before realizing what he was doing then dragging his eyes upward in half panic when he caught himself at it. 

He saw with relief that Barret looked amused more than anything, to his horror felt himself flushing in response. 

“What’s in Junon?” Barret asked him, the low rumble of his voice doing little to cut through Reeve’s sudden loss of composure. 

He had no idea what he had been thinking, when he made his way across the room. Just followed some mad impulse to get closer and... what? Walk into the middle of AVALANCHE as if he belonged there? 

Well, it had worked for Cait Sith, he supposed. And Vincent, for that matter. 

“Got a job there,” he lied, “Logistics at the port.” 

Cid too. Dropped everything and walked away with the clothes on his back to follow a group of mad activists halfway across the continent – maybe further, by the time they were through. 

“Logistics, huh? Sounds like you’re a good man to know.” 

“... I try.” 

But there were consequences to the kind of reckless behaviour Cid had displayed when he walked away from his life – as recently as that morning Reeve had received an email about the progress of the legal team on that front. 

Reeve cleared his throat, “So what brings you here?” 

“Would you believe I’m saving the world?” 

Reeve glanced over sharply, in time to catch the gleam of humour in Barret’s eye, the subtle uptick at the corner of his mouth that revealed that he was kidding. Well, mostly kidding.

“Sounds like a big job,” Reeve heard his own voice answer without fully realizing what he was about to say, “Sure you’re up to it?” 

_Saving the world._ With everything Reeve knew about the man, he genuinely couldn’t tell if it was a flex or a pick-up line or a recruitment line. He wondered what it would mean if it was the last option. Tried to imagine what it would mean to walk away from the responsibility and the pressure and the guilt... everything... and felt reality try to spin out from under him. He was damn good at his job, but Midgar would clearly keep ticking along without him just as it had without his predecessor. 

“The _biggest_ job,” Barret grinned, and turned his attention forward to take a long swallow from his beer. 

The consequences clearly would be much more personal, Reeve reflected. His bank accounts would be frozen, of course. And who knew what would happen to his doting, devoted mother in Shinra housing if her damn fool son had some kind of nervous breakdown and started chasing an eco-terrorist group around the planet _off_ the clock. He couldn’t imagine who would water his plants, or keep up with the condo association, or pay his car insurance or any of the hundred other things ( _safe, comfortable things_ his mind whispered) that a responsible adult needed to do to function if he just walked away with AVALANCHE. 

He was saved answering when one of the men gathered at the pool tables shouted over to them. 

“Hey, Shinra Guy! Bring your friend over here!”

Reeve flinched and Barret’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. 

“That you?” 

Reeve swallowed hard, the beginning of danger building in the other man’s face reminding him suddenly of exactly how things had gone in Gongaga, this time without Cait Sith around to intervene. 

“Would it be so bad if I was?” He asked. He was almost certain that Barret would contain his temper in the context of the small bar. Almost. 

“Damn right it would,” Barret answered, getting to his feet glaring, and Reeve mirrored the move. 

Standing in front of the former leader of AVALANCHE, Reeve found himself suddenly feeling small in a way that he hadn’t since his second year of secondary school when he had all at once grown head and shoulders above all of his classmates and many of his teachers. The easy authority he had begun wearing as a second skin with his ascent through his department evaporated as he was forced to look up into Barret’s sudden anger, the man inches taller and at least twice as broad as Reeve himself. 

Reeve cleared his suddenly dry throat, “Look, buddy, I’m on vacation here...”

“Does the planet get any time off?” Barret asked him, “From all those fucking reactors sucking it dry?” 

They had attracted attention, Reeve realized. Or at least Barret had, his size and anger coupled with the involuntary rattling clicks of his gun arm where it hung beside him (Reeve didn’t worry about the gun, had learned it was a response to stress and outside the man’s control, but knew also that the rest of the bar didn’t know that). 

“Is everything okay over here?” Dennis was suddenly beside them, and when Reeve glanced to the side saw that much of the group from around the pool tables was either making their way over or watching very closely from where they were. 

“Fine,” Reeve answered, perhaps a little optimistically, but realizing that neither his role as a department head nor his cover as Cait Sith would benefit from an altercation in a Costa del Sol tavern. 

Before Barret could offer a different opinion, Aeris had slipped between them almost comically – impossibly small compared to the two men facing off. She looked up at him briefly, all bright green eyes and freckles under the wide brim of her hat, and he thought for a moment that recognition flashed across her features, making him think of the time they had crossed in Hojo’s lab. 

In a second the look was gone, however, and she turned away, “There’s no problem here. We were just leaving, right Barret?” 

Barret glared, but gave a small nod, “No problem.” 

As quickly as that they were gone, leaving Reeve to wonder what the hell had just happened. 

He rejoined the group at the pool tables but remained shaken, the back-slapping commiseration form the men around him doing little to settle his rattled nerves. He played poorly at pool for the rest of the afternoon. 

\---

Cait Sith was dozing in a patch of sunshine with Red XIII when the door of the hotel room opened and Barret and Aeris entered in storm. Tifa jumped up from one of the beds where she had been leafing through a magazine.

“Did something go wrong?” 

“Nuthin’s wrong,” Barret snapped, slipping around her to go fishing in one of his packs and avoid conversation. 

Still feeling sore and off balance about their encounter, Reeve focused on the man while he dug in his gear. 

Watching Barret become increasingly agitated, he finally asked in the cat’s voice, “I thought you went out to gather information. Didn’t you find anyone who would talk to you, Barret?”

Barret glared at him, then softened as if realizing his target, “Not anyone who mattered.” 

It... hurt. 

Feeling suddenly worse than if he hadn’t spoken, Reeve didn’t reply – just watched as the big man gathered a change of clothes and disappeared into the bathroom. 

When the door closed behind Barret’s retreating back, Aeris settled with Tifa against the headboard of one of the hotel’s cramped beds and began a quick, whispered conversation, glancing at the bathroom door at intervals. 

It didn’t take any great deductive skills for Reeve to know that the frantic whispering was about him – or rather, some stranger encountered at the bar – and he didn’t feel prepared to hear it yet. 

He tuned out of the cat and back to the bar across town.


	23. Chapter 23

Reeve hardly noticed the afternoon go by, self-doubt and frustration thrilling below his skin and setting his teeth on edge. 

The young men from the pool game had refused to let him leave the tavern after the incident with Barret, including him in their group with a show of solidarity that he would have found touching if his nerves had been less raw. 

The determination to keep him from leaving on his own (perhaps out of fraternity, or more likely understanding how badly rattled he was by the brief encounter if not understanding why) had lasted through the afternoon, finally culminating in the entire group wandering down to the beach for surfing – an activity from which Reeve was grateful to find he had finally been excused. 

“If you’re gonna sulk I not going to stop Pascal the next time he tries to get you in the water.” 

“I don’t surf,” Reeve protested, frowning out at the waves, “And I’m not... my god, am I sulking?” 

Dennis laughed instead of immediately answering, bumping against Reeve’s shoulder with easy camaraderie before leaning back where they sat against the seawall. 

“A little. No one blames you though.” 

Reeve didn’t answer, just watched the surfers in the light of the setting sun. 

Whatever fit of madness had seized him at the tavern clearly had not yet run his course, as his mind still swam with hope and regret and confusion... and a generous portion of rejection alongside. 

_Nobody that mattered._

Not long after the turbulent arrival of Barret and Aeris in AVALANCHE’s shared hotel room the pair had gone out again with Tifa in tow, headed to check on the progress of the Tiny Bronco’s retrofit and leaving Cait Sith and Red XIII to nap through the afternoon. The break it afforded Reeve from splitting his attention between two places was for once no comfort as it left him more time to dwell on the encounter with Barret. 

“You know,” he began, “I thought last night when you asked me to have lunch you meant for it to be... well... _lunch_.” 

Dennis laughed again and Reeve tried not to let his irritation show, still agitated and feeling thin-skinned.

“I did, last night... but I also know when to take no for an answer. Not sure you do though, considering that scene with the big guy...” 

Reeve hesitated, trying to find the words for all of the complexity there without bringing up Shinra or AVALANCHE or Cait Sith, “That was... something else.” 

“Sure it was,” Dennis agreed, in a way that suggested he wasn’t buying what Reeve was selling, “Hey, shift your leg.” 

Before Reeve could ask what the younger man was doing, he had stretch out in the sand and dropped his head onto Reeve’s thigh, staring up at him intently. 

“What are you doing?” 

“Getting comfortable,” Dennis answered unapologetically. 

“I feel like you’re staring up my nose,” Reeve frowned. 

“It’s very clean,” Dennis assured him with exaggerated solemnity. 

He looked critically at the man for a moment. Recently graduated from one of Midgar’s universities, he was probably twenty-two, possibly twenty-three. The same age as the younger members of AVALANCHE but somehow so impossibly _young_ compared to Aeris and Tifa and Cloud. There were no dark shadows behind his eyes, no history of pain or learning too early exactly how unfair the wider world could be. More like Reeve himself had been at the same age, if he was honest with himself, without even the threat of war haunting his mind.

Reeve sighed again, but didn’t move away, instead turning his focus back to the crowd in the water trying to catch a whitecap “Why are you so interested in me, anyway?”

“Maybe I’m looking for a rich husband?” Reeve glanced down long enough to see that the man was joking.

“You’d too smart for that. You’d get bored.”

“Probably.”

“... Anyway, what made you think I’m...” Reeve paused, considering. Available? Interested?

“Gay?”

He grunted an acknowledgment, and looked back only when the young man began to laugh. 

Noticing Reeve’s frown the man sobered, “Oh wait, you’re serious.” 

“What’s so obvious?” Reeve asked, suddenly uncomfortable. While not closeted by any stretch, he also hadn’t thought he was so transparent - for all the small comments he made a habit to ignore in the Shinra building. 

“You mean besides that scene this afternoon?” Dennis asked him, sitting up to look at him more directly, “Geez, you really don’t talk about it, do you?”

“Usually only before sex,” Reeve answered, trying to see the humor in the situation under the other man’s scrutiny. 

“So, what, married to your job?” 

“Something like that,” Reeve answered, thinking of the long hours in his lives both as a department head and as a spy. 

“That sounds like a – oh hey, it’s that guy.” 

Reeve followed his gaze and was again caught off guard without the warning from his robot self. He couldn’t stop the small noise in his throat when he caught sight of AVALANCHE walking up the beach – Barret trailing sullen behind Cloud and Tifa just as Dennis had said, and making Reeve hate the way that his heart did a sudden nervous flip even after the altercation in the bar and the harsh words in the hotel room. 

“It is, isn’t it?” Dennis prompted him, “The guy from earlier?” 

“I,” Reeve swallowed hard and forced himself to look away, “I don’t know. Maybe.” 

“You’re a terrible liar,” Dennis told him, “The guy’s a hundred feet tall and has a gun on his arm. They don’t make ‘em like that often.” 

Reeve swallowed hard but didn’t answer, and Dennis prodded, “So what’s the deal? It’s not just that he didn’t want you hitting on him. He an ex?”

“No,” Reeve laughed, although it sounded forced in his ears, “No, nothing like that.” 

“But you definitely do know him from somewhere. That part was true,” Dennis prompted him, adding with mischief, “Old crush?” 

Reeve shook his head, began saying, “No, he’s...” then didn’t know where to finish, running through the list of problems he had been carelessly ignoring at the bar earlier. A criminal ( _Shinra’s most wanted_ ); a dangerous eco-terrorist ( _indisputably_ ); arguably a mass murderer ( _worse than dropping the Sector 7 plate?_ ); almost certainly straight ( _maybe not_ ). Reeve sighed, and considered his audience, “Problematic.”

“Aww, you mean straight?” 

Reeve choked and glared at the young man, “You think you’re really smart, don’t you?” 

“You did just say so yourself.” 

Reeve sighed, “I suppose I did.” 

He let his eyes track the group as they moved along the shoreline, slowly moving past and out of view. Whatever lapse of reason had driven him to approach Barret at the bar earlier had thankfully passed, leaving only the twist of something unpleasant and lonely in its wake. 

“If your internship doesn’t work out,” Reeve began before knowing quite what he was going to say, “You could always find a job with Shinra. The Midgar branch is always looking for bright young people.”

“Mr. Tuesti, are you suggesting I use my powerful connections to get a job?” 

Reeve winced, then looked over to see that he was being laughed at again. Even so, he found he bristled at the implication, “You’d still have to get the job… But I could give you a hell of a personal reference.” 

Being sent on one mad errand after another since his promotion to department head had left him feeling less in control than he had been before he ever took the position (the wild chase across the continent with AVALANCHE only exacerbating the feeling). Being able to talk about work in a measurable, understandable way let him feel like he was on solid ground again – even for something as trivial as a reference. 

“I might just, you know, for an offer like that. If the internship doesn’t work out.” 

It wouldn’t hurt to have the young man around the office either, Reeve thought, trying to remember the last time he hadn’t felt alone in the Shinra building. 

\---

Reeve was surprised to run into Mukki at the port that night as he was making his way to the Shinra transport for Junon. 

He’d said formal goodbyes earlier with a vague agreement to talk further about the project details with Mukki’s team in Midgar upon his return, so running into the man again was tinged with the oddness of having forgotten something at a party and needing to return for it. 

If Mukki was uncomfortable, he didn’t show it. 

“Reeve! Boarding so late – couldn’t find a daytime trip?” 

It had occurred to him, but he was itching to get back to the office. More than ever in light of his afternoon encounter, “It’s our fastest ship. I need to get back.” 

“Sure you do. Sure you do,” Mukki agreed, and without asking grabbed the handle of Reeve’s suitcase, “I’ve got some business out here tonight. I’ll walk with you.” 

Bewildered, but increasingly tolerant of Mukki’s eccentricities (having found over the week that there was really no other way to feel about the man’s behaviour), he followed half a pace behind as he watched Mukki navigating the port, commenting occasionally on course corrections when the man was distracted by his own monologue. 

“... to Icicle Inn in a couple of weeks if the weather turns cold enough up there. The boys want to try snowboarding. Snowboarding, can you believe that silly damn thing? But I heard there were hot springs – how can I refuse? You should head up and meet us, if your NeoMidgar isn’t off the ground yet. No more of this heat stroke, right? I don’t think you’re cut out for the heat. We’re on standby for NeoMidgar of course, just say the word! But until then...” 

One of the nice things about Mukki, Reeve had learned in spite of his early work-related frustrations, was that talking to him didn’t necessarily require a great deal of audience participation. Especially past a certain point in the evening. 

“Ah! This is your ride? Very military-industrial chic, my friend. Hey, maybe not snowboarding. Some of the boys told me surfing wasn’t your bag – also said you had a bit of a dust-up at the bar, tough luck guy – why not head to the Saucer if you need a break? Dio’s a good guy, he’ll set you up if he knows you’re from Shinra...”

Reeve was already well acquainted with the exceptional allowances that Dio made for Shinra operations, but withheld comment in favour of a small ‘go on’ noise. 

Hardly needing the encouragement, Mukki continued, “He’s gonna make you look at that damn rock collection of his though. What do you think of a guy like that collecting rocks, huh? _Dull_ , I tell you, Reeve. No accounting for taste I suppose. Talked my ear off for full hour when he found that Keystone thing. Said it’s part of some old temple. Ha! You wouldn’t believe what he paid for the thing.” 

Reeve was so busy wondering how Dio ever managed to get a word in edgewise – perhaps before afternoon cocktails started? – that he nearly missed the punchline. 

“Keystone?” 

“Ah, that’s what he called it. Some sort of mystic silliness from an old story. Personally I think he got robbed, but hey, as long as he’s happy.” 

“Of course,” Reeve agreed. 

The had come to a halt just far enough from the ship’s loading dock to avoid the last minute flurry of Shinra personnel and dock workers preparing to set sail. 

Reeve reached for his luggage, only to be pulled into another of Mukki’s sweaty but exuberant hugs. He found he didn’t mind quite as much as the first time. 

“You really are a weird guy, Reeve,” Mukki told him even as his ribs creaked from the man’s hold, “Did I mention that already? A weird guy. I’m glad we met. I’m gonna miss you.” 

In spite of the suspicion that he and Mukki had had a very different experience of the past week (or were simply cruising at very different inebriation levels) Reeve found himself appreciating the sentiment. 

On impulse he asked, “Mukki, why aren’t you more... careful?” 

The carefree grin on the man’s face faded slightly, leaving something shrewd in its wake and making Reeve wonder if he might have misread the man again. 

“Why are you still playing by someone else’s rules?” Mukki asked him. 

Reeve frowned, “I don’t –”

“Sure you do,” Mukki cut him off, “You’ve been letting me jerk you around all week.” 

Before Reeve could form a response to that, Mukki clapped him on the shoulder heavily, “Aww, enough about that. Get on your boat and have a good time. See you around, Reeve.” 

“See you around,” Reeve echoed with an incredulous shake of his head, and anything else he wanted to say was rendered moot as the man turned away and was suddenly gone in the crowded port.

He’d have to call Heidegger about the Keystone. 

\---

Around the same time that Reeve was navigating the ship to his cabin – if anything smaller and less pleasant than the one he had occupied on the trip out, but with the bonus of a shorter travel time and a functioning onboard fax machine – AVALANCHE was pouring back into the hotel room in Costa del Sol. 

Cait Sith looked up in tandem with Red XIII, who had been napping happily through the day as only a feline could manage. 

The group, the same three Reeve had seen wandering on the beach earlier now with Aeris in tow, seemed to have returned more relaxed and easy than they had been on going out. Cautiously, he turned his attention to Barret, and with mixed feelings saw none of the disquiet that Reeve himself was still carrying low in his gut. 

Well, at least he hadn’t compromised his cover. 

While Cait Sith watched Barret and Cloud seat themselves at the small room’s table, Aeris and Tifa dropped onto the center bed on either side of Red XIII. The young women had found a project for themselves braiding his mane – a task Aeris had begun while traveling in the Tiny Bronco and which Tifa had joined in during the previous lazy afternoon in Costa del Sol.

The Cosmo Beast huffed a long-suffering sigh but didn’t object, and Reeve thought he might very well enjoy the attention more than he was letting on. 

“Anyone heard from Yuffie?” Cloud asked the room, and when neither Red XIII nor Cait Sith offered new information he ran a hand through his hair in a nervous gesture. 

“She hasn’t been here at all,” Red XIII elaborated before dropping his head back to his front paws when Aeris scolded him for wiggling. 

“She’s probably holed up like the last time we came through,” Tifa supplied, “She came back with a half a dozen rare materia last time and I’d bet she’s trying to do it again.” 

“She might also have gone back to the Bronco,” Aeris added, “She’s crazy about Cid since he started letting her drive.” 

Cloud made a face, “I don’t like it. She’s –”

“Perfectly capable of taking care of herself and we all know it,” Tifa interrupted him, and Red XIII let out a small yelp as she attached a braid a little too vehemently, “... Sorry.” 

She patted his head in reconciliation and he grudgingly allowed her to continue, glancing sideways from time to time to gauge her mood. 

“She’s also a political target,” Barret added, and Reeve thought it might be the first time any of them had acknowledged it directly, “and sixteen and a little dumb about materia.” 

Tifa sighed, and Red XIII pulled his head out of her range before she could pull his mane again, hopping onto the floor and padding toward the table. 

“I can find her if need be. I know her by scent now.” 

Cloud regarded him for a considering moment, then sighed, “Not yet, Tifa’s right. She’s been taking care of herself for a long time without us.” 

Across the room, Aeris and Tifa seemed to be engaged in some complex non-verbal exchange that involved a lot of eyebrow raising and eye shifting. 

“We’re going back to our room,” Aeris announced at the conclusion of the baffling interaction, Tifa standing along with her as they moved toward the door, “Coming, Red?” 

Red XIII tilted his head to one side, and his mane shifted with a slide of glossy fresh braids that reached halfway to his withers. He shook himself solidly (possibly considering that the young women might still have intentions of finishing the job) and answered, “Perhaps I will stay here.”

When the door clicked softly into place behind the two women, Barret sighed before asking, “What are we gonna do about the Temple?”

Cloud frowned, “It’s upsetting Aeris, that’s unusual enough.” 

Beside them, Red XIII was hopping back onto the bed he had recently vacated, where he rolled onto his side and resumed shedding contentedly. 

“It’s in all the Planetology books, you know...” Barret paused, looking thoughtful, then frowned, “Never paid as much attention to the history as the science. And the books are all under the plate in Sector 7 now I guess.”

“You remember anything?” Cloud asked him, sidestepping the conversational IED simply by pretending it wasn’t there, “Could Sephiroth or Shinra think there’s some weapon or power source there?” 

“I remember it’s a point of pilgrimage. Talked about it being a site of power – I dunno if it actually is. Hard to say without anyone left around to ask. Except. Well.” 

“Yeah,” Cloud stood, ending the conversation, “I’m gonna get some sleep. Maybe with all the people who come through here somebody’s heard something.” 

Barret made a noise of acknowledgement when Cloud awkwardly patted his shoulder while leaving the table, then rested his chin in his hand as he was left alone.

Reeve felt a brief, strange moment of wanting to report what Mukki had said about the keystone to them, but it passed before he could act on it. Whatever loyalties he had thought he was building toward AVALANCHE were clearly just a product of stress and prolonged exposure. 

“You’ve been awfully quiet, cat,” Barret observed without turning. 

Across the room, Cloud leaned his massive sword against the wall by the bed nearest the door before dropping onto it fully clothed. 

“Still running diagnostics,” Reeve lied, and found that he was glad to be addressing Barret’s back when he said it, some guilt or hurt or both weighing heavily in his mind. 

Barret stood from the table and stretched his shoulders before turning to where Cait Sith sat perched on the big moogle. When he took the few steps to close the distance between them Reeve had to make an active effort not to let the cat expose the lingering sore feelings of its controller. 

“Sorry about this afternoon. Didn’t mean to make a scene.” 

He couldn’t know, of course, who he was apologizing to. It was a strange shadow of the interaction that Reeve craved, some acknowledgement of the weird moment that had passed between them in the tavern, even if Barret had no idea.

“Everything’s fine,” Cait Sith said in its happy voice, and Reeve tried to believe it. 

Barret reached out to scratch the little cat’s ears with gentle affection, and Reeve couldn’t find a way to refuse, knowing that he had allowed the interaction to become so normalized between them that to shrink away would only cause suspicion. 

He was disappointed to learn that it was also still horribly comforting.


	24. Chapter 24

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m not a big fan of including multiple ships in a fic, just in case readers aren’t partial to one of the secondary pairings. That said, if you were so inclined as to read some Aeris/Tifa into this, you might choose to [read this](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27842650) (NSFW) story as chapter 23.5. Its exclusion, however, will not in any way affect the understanding or enjoyment of _this_ story.

Not long out of port, Reeve was able to make a patchy connection to Midgar via the ship’s radio, filling in Heidegger on the Keystone and the anticipated extended stopover of AVALANCHE in Costa del Sol while waiting for the Bronco’s retrofit. 

“Dio huh? He’s --- good guy to work with,” Heidegger’s voice crackled over the line, “See – AVALA—out there to ---.” 

“Say again?” 

A flare of static resolved itself briefly into a steady signal, “We’re making arrangements. I’ll be in touch.” 

Satisfied that his report in had been made, and that there was not a lot of new instruction he could receive while stuck in transit, he turned the communications room back over to the officer in charge. 

\---

With Reeve safely out of town Cait Sith had been able to announce his diagnostic algorithms had detected no further problems, and was able to again venture out of the hotel. The vacation town seemed warmer, somehow, touring it in the wake of AVALANCHE than it had in the week Reeve had spent there in person – even when tempered by the feeling of separateness brought to the forefront of his attention when they had crossed paths directly. 

“There’s always music here,” Aeris had remarked to the little robot that dashed along at her heels as they made their way down to the docks that morning, “It makes everything else so much... quieter.” 

She smiled down at him, and he had no idea how to respond. 

“Oh, don’t look at me like that Cait, just thinking out loud.” 

On the boat to Junon, Reeve had returned to paperwork – piles of non-urgent but necessary administrative matters that he had printed or stashed in his harddrive before leaving the hotel the prior evening. The process of systematic problem solving, and the feeling of having the answers, settled his nerves in a way that nothing had since he’d left Midgar the week before. He followed the progress of AVALANCHE with only half his attention while confirming the previous week’s budget updates from around the department. 

When they stopped by the dry dock where the Bronco was suspended for work, they were able to confirm that Yuffie had in fact spent the night sleeping in the cabin with Cid and Vincent, but had disappeared before sunrise on some errand of her own. 

Cid’s “buddy” who owned the shop turned out to be nearly as much of a character as Cid himself. By the time the contingent of AVALANCHE who had chosen to spend the night more comfortably at the hotel made it down for a morning check in, the men were already arguing about pontoons between bouts of welding with dangerously little safety equipment. 

“Cid expects the Bronco will be ready to run in a little less than a week,” Vincent informed them in his quiet, measured tone, “If they don’t change their minds about the design again.” 

Leaving the hangar, Tifa announced “I need to borrow Cloud for a bit,” before grabbing the ex-SOLDIER with no further explanation and dragging him ahead at speed even as the man looked over his shoulder to the main group with alarm and bafflement. 

Aeris laughed and waved as they disappeared. 

“You and me again today, Barret,” she smiled, “No more trouble today?” 

“You an’ me and the cat,” he emphasized the point by scooping Cait Sith from where he crouched at Aeris’s feet, moogle left behind to soak in the air conditioning with Red XIII, “Better keep me in line, kittycat.” 

Reeve’s world lurched from more than the motion of his robot avatar as he was settled onto Barret’s muscular shoulder, only the onboard AI stopping the cat from overbalancing and dropping to the ground in disorientation. _No problem_ , Reeve thought weakly through the link, but the bright, “No problem!” echoed by the cat showed none of his reticence. 

They made their way back toward the tourist district slowly, playing the part of vacationers surprisingly well for how conspicuous they must have been in the crowd. Aeris stopped at the front displays of boutiques with every couple of buildings that they passed, making appropriate noises of appreciation at the baubles and trinkets she found there. 

Having draped the cat’s long body around Barret’s neck not long after being lifted into the air (and leaving Reeve again with a confused feeling of both warmth and self-recrimination) he was treated to an up-close view of the indulgent expression with which Barret observed Aeris’s exploration of the town. 

“... She hasn’t left Midgar before,” Reeve realized all at once, and the cat voiced the thought. 

“There’s a lot to see,” Barret confirmed, and raised his hand to ruffle the cat’s ears, making Reeve drop his pen in the middle of annotating a fax. 

In spite of his original excuse about the cat not tolerating the Costa del Sol heat, it barely registered in the range of the robot’s environmental tolerance. So it was only when, a half hour nearer to noon, he noticed Barret breaking out in a sheen of sweat that it occurred to him that the day was becoming uncomfortable for his teammates... or possibly just for the man carrying around an extra thirty kilograms of robot like a fur collar. Although if Barret was feeling the strain from the extra effort he was hiding it extraordinarily well – his face remaining perfectly placid as the cat shifted to keep balance. 

Before Reeve could ask for the cat to be put down, he spotted a familiar face in the crowd.

The face spotted them, too – or more specifically Aeris – and suddenly Mukki was waving and making his way toward them, leaving a lively table behind him to hop the fence enclosing one of the many small bistros dotting the area and approach at a light jog. 

“Now there’s a face I remember,” he greeted Aeris when he was in range, “How're you doing, sweetheart?” 

Aeris seemed temporarily taken aback by the energy with which he shook her hand, before she smiled with recognition, “Oh! Mr...?”

“Mukki, just Mukki,” if he was offended to be forgotten, he didn’t show it, bubbling over with good humor behind his ill-advised mustache, “From Sector 6 right? You were hanging around with the blond boy. Strange one, him. Hey, you know how he’s doing now? We all worried about the little guy, the way he was acting.” 

“Oh, he’s around here too,” Aeris answered, sparkling with sudden mischief, “You might just run into him before long.”

“Really now?” Mukki grinned, “Well, just in case, you tell Little Bubby I said ‘hi’. You all should swing out to my place on the beach – it’s a great party this time of year with everyone getting out of the city.” 

“I’ll tell him,” Aeris promised with a grin that took up her entire face and made Reeve wonder exactly what the context of their meeting in Sector 6 had been.

“Good, good, and, uhh... bring your friend here, too,” Mukki’s attention turned to Barret, extending a hand which Barret shook, jostling the passenger on his shoulders. 

Even without the sudden movement, the scene had Reeve’s full attention, and he felt a rush of sudden irrational jealousy when Mukki’s gaze swept Barret top to bottom and back up again suggestively. 

Without entirely planning it, Cait Sith’s tail curled protectively across Barret’s chest and the robot emitted a rumbling metallic noise that Reeve was alarmed to realize was a growl. Objectively, he knew it was within the cat’s range of programmed expressions. In application, he had never practiced it, nor had any intention of setting it off. 

It clearly alarmed the rest of the group too, and he found that all eyes had swung to rest on his little avatar where it bristled atop Barret’s shoulders. 

“Everything okay, cat?” Barret asked him, face reading surprise and concern just a few inches away from that of Cait Sith, and Reeve was glad to be on a ship half an ocean away where his embarrassment wasn’t so obvious.

“Sorry,” the cat answered as Reeve fell back on the explanation that had carried him through the last week, “must be the heat.” 

“There’s a lot of that going around here lately,” Mukki observed, fixing the cat with a thoughtful expression, “better be careful about that.” 

“We will,” Aeris answered, stretching to flatten the robot’s fur back into place, and Reeve thought suddenly of his conversation with Heidegger – incomplete, but with a vague sense that it would be best if AVALANCHE were to retrieve the Keystone. 

“Hey, it sounds like this guy travels a lot,” he announced through the cat then turned to Mukki, “Ever heard of something called a Keystone?” 

The man’s thoughtful expression turned speculative, the cat’s odd behaviour clearly passed out of mind, “Keystone, huh? Lot of buzz about _that_ lately too. Never thought I’d be the last to know... Yeah, head to the Gold Saucer – the owner can tell you all about it if you can get a meeting with him.” 

“You know what it is?” Aeris asked, frowned. 

“Nah, haven’t got a clue. But it seems like a lot of people are getting really excited about it these days. I’d hurry if I were you,” he paused, then shrugged, “anyway. Places to be, and all that. I’ll see you guys around? Don’t forget to tell Little Bubby I said ‘hi’.” 

“Be hard to forget,” Barret agreed, mouth twisting with what was probably amusement. 

“We will,” Aeris promised, “Thank you Mukki.” 

“No problem,” the man waved, but he was already headed back to his party at the bistro. 

“Little Bubby?” Barret asked Aeris when Mukki was out of earshot. 

“You’ll have to ask Cloud,” she smiled, and began leading the way up the street before she could be asked any more questions.

\---

It turned out that they didn’t need to pass any messages to Cloud, as he and Tifa had encountered Mukki not long after the first group had turned to head back for the hotel. 

“Who was that guy?” Barret asked in the face of Tifa’s amusement and Cloud’s discomfiture. 

Reeve too found himself wondering what Mukki’s connection to Cloud was, and if the experience of the former SOLDIER had been as surreal as his own, but he kept his curiosity to himself. 

“Yes, Bubby, I want to know too” Tifa added, giving their leader a quick poke in the ribs and making him grunt and frown at her. 

“It’s nothing,” Cloud protested, “Just move on.” 

“Sure you aren’t going to get jealous, Cloud?” Aeris responded, tone light and teasing, “He seemed pretty excited to get Barret out to his beach house, too, you know.” 

“That’s none of my business,” Cloud protested at the same time Tifa was letting out a whoop and congratulating Barret on all the attention he’d been garnering since they arrived in town. 

“Just that charming, I guess,” Barret grinned at her over his sunglasses. 

“It’s because they don’t know you yet, obviously,” Cloud countered, still frowning at the women’s enthusiasm. 

“That’s cold, man,” Barret answered, but his voice was still laughing in contrast to the offended air he was trying to put on. 

From his perch on top of the moogle, Cait Sith’s cameras captured the small smile on Cloud’s face before he announced that he was going back out on his own and slipped from the room. 

“Wait a sec,” Barret protested, jogging after him, “Got some news while we were out. Lemme fill you in.” 

Watching the two men disappear from the room Reeve almost didn’t notice Red XIII slipping up beside the moogle on silent paws, commenting, “Humans are very strange animals, aren’t they?” 

Reeve turned his focus on the creature beside him, and felt acutely the strangeness that he had begun to ignore in their interactions.

“They sure are,” he agreed. 

\---

It was late in the day before Reeve was able to get the satellite phone running and make a stable connection to Heidegger in Midgar, the line bright and clear compared to the ship radio he had been using in the morning. 

“Sorry about that mix up,” Heidegger told him, “We’ve gotta get all these ships caught up on tech. Especially the new ones. It’s a damn disgrace.” 

Reeve agreed internally that it in fact was a sad state of affairs for the global superpower to be letting its flagship vessels run with broken down technology, but didn’t think it prudent to express the thought to the head of the state military so casually. 

“About the Keystone,” Heidegger carried on, “Got a couple of the Turks headed there now to confirm that Dio’s got it. But I’ve made arrangements for you to get AVALANCHE there. Feed them some bullshit about your connections at the Saucer and send them to relieve Dio of his new acquisition.”

“Why not just ask him directly?” Reeve asked. Half his mind drifted to where Cait Sith sat on the beach in Costa del Sol, half the party down in the waves and the remainder sitting against the sea wall not far from where Reeve had been himself the evening before. 

“No good,” Heidegger answered, “He’d give it over, of course, if we put the pressure on... but he’s an important corporate ally. Now, we send AVALANCHE to take it? He won’t be able to blame Shinra for touching his toys. We can get it from you later.” 

“I see,” Reeve agreed slowly. Of course, it made sense – why alienate an ally when you could exploit an enemy? 

The Cait Sith had flopped onto its back in the cool sand, halfway between Red XIII (still averse to water on general principle) and Barret (having decided that salt water wasn’t worth the risk on his grafted arm). The sunset was to their back, but it still turned the waves into a pink and orange display out front of them.

He directed the cat to sit up and watch the people in the water acting their age for a brief window – Tifa and Aeris teamed up against Cloud in a flurry of splashing. Reeve’s stomach clenched with guilt. 

“Why is AVALANCHE being given so much freedom, anyway?” Reeve asked Heidegger, “A month ago you dropped an entire district of the city to get rid of them, why the wait and see approach now?” 

“Not my decision,” Heidegger answered, dismissive, “It’s not a priority for the new president... and they’re a lot less trouble out of the city – especially with someone keeping an eye on them, hey, Reeve?” 

“I suppose,” he agreed. It was true enough – the entire group had undergone a major shift of objective since the reappearance of Sephiroth. 

“And they are awfully good at being in the right place at the right time lately... almost uncanny, hey? ... Anyway, we’ve collected some insurance since you went out of town. There shouldn’t be anything else to worry about from that group for a while.”

“Insurance?” Reeve asked, frowning. He’d thought that Cait Sith was the ‘insurance’. 

Heidegger roared laughter into the line and Reeve held the phone away from his ear until it subsided.

“I’ll have the Turks fill you in when you get back to Midgar. Don’t worry so much, Reeve. We’ve got it all under control.” 

Their conversation ended after Reeve scribbled a few lines of instructions from the man about how to access the arranged transport to the Gold Saucer – a tourist shuttle that ran from Costa del Sol. 

He shut off the phone and wandered back to his cabin for the night, his mind mostly on the beach. 

In the water, the alliance structure had shifted and Tifa was the new subject of the onslaught. She shrieked with mock-distress as Aeris hopped onto her back and overbalanced both of them into the waves.

“If we need to get to the Gold Saucer,” Cait Sith suggested, carefully, as if from a long period of contemplation, “I could probably get free space on the shuttle service. I’m still their mascot, you know.” 

“Hmm... Not bad, cat,” Barret agreed, and reach out to stroke the robot’s fur absently. 

On the ship, Reeve’s step hitched as the touch ran the full length of his back. He ignored it and kept walking.


	25. Chapter 25

The task of getting AVALANCHE to the Gold Saucer hit an unexpected hurdle in the form of Cid Highwind. 

“Not leaving the Bronco,” he announced in the face of Cloud’s increasing agitation. 

The seemingly effortless authority that the young man had commanded in the group was being sorely tested by the pilot’s resistance, Cloud’s instinct to keep the group together as much as possible proving a source of major friction for the first time. 

Cait Sith tilted its head thoughtfully to one side as Reeve gave the situation his full attention, pushing his paperwork aside at his small desk on the Shinra naval vessel. It hadn’t occurred to him before how little effort Cloud had previously invested into the task of maintaining authority. It was becoming painfully clear as the former SOLDIER became increasingly flustered. 

“I... we need to find out more about the Keystone,” Cloud argued. 

“Fine an’ good,” Cid waved, already turning away to resume the work he was doing on some component Reeve couldn’t identify but had to assume was important, “Y’all go find out. I’ll be here waitin’.” 

Cloud shifted from foot to foot, and glanced around at the others who had accompanied him down to the dry dock. 

Cait Sith shrugged when the Cloud’s eyes landed on it, and his gaze traveled on until finally Aeris sighed and stepped forward.

“Please, Cid,” she joined him at the work bench, making him curse and drop his tools, quickly reaching to press a pair of goggles into her hand from a hook beside them. 

“Damnit, girl, workplace safety,” his frown did nothing to discourage the young woman. She took the goggles and dropped them into the middle of his workspace.

“You can stop working while I’m talking to you, then,” she frowned back, some steel behind her eyes that Reeve could recall seeing on only a few occasions – and usually directed at the pilot. 

While Aeris debated keeping the whole of the group together, Reeve turned the robot’s attention back to where Cloud had wrapped his arms around himself, scowling in the direction of the Bronco but not seeming to see it. 

The young man failed to respond when Tifa rested a hand on his arm with an expression halfway between worry and bafflement. The sense that Cloud had been becoming gradually more agitated since encountering Sephiroth in Nibelheim had occurred to Reeve more than once, but somehow never quite so acutely as it did in that moment. 

The former SOLDIER shuffled and sighed, waiting for the result of Aeris’s negotiations. 

Their assembly in the dry dock was two days past when the core leadership of AVALANCHE had decided to follow up about the Keystone at the Gold Saucer. The previous day, Reeve had spent as the robot – confirming with a travel agency the reservations for fast transit that someone in Shinra’s administrative department had booked remotely. 

He’d found it a painfully complicated experience to navigate through the unaccompanied Cait Sith (not least explaining that the talking cat was a Gold Saucer employee to the skeptical young woman at the tourist agency), but after his task was completed he had been able to spend the remainder of the day letting the little cat wander the streets of Costa del Sol... and letting himself gain some much needed space to settle his nerves and gain perspective. 

His nerves were the smaller challenge, soothed by the repetition of catching up on the minor administrative tasks that had fallen by the wayside over the week. 

His perspective was having a harder time falling in line. Certainly, he was getting too invested in the task of watching over AVALANCHE. Anyone doing a psych eval – if that was the sort of thing he was subjected to, considering the project’s level of classification – would certainly have flagged him some time ago as losing objective regarding his actual task... If not before then certainly _after_ his ludicrous attempt to contact the team directly, and whatever strange moment of insanity had compelled him to create that situation. 

He was getting tired of keeping secrets from everyone. As Reeve _and_ as the robot. 

Finally Cait Sith had spent the afternoon on the piers, listening to the sound of waves and sea birds as boats made their way into and out of the harbour. Sometime in the Costa del Sol evening, Yuffie had appeared as if from nowhere and dropped down beside him, dangling her feet over the edge of the pier and scratching the fur at the back of the little cat’s neck, making Reeve sigh and pinch the bridge of his nose while the cat offered her a feline grin ( _“We’re headed out to the Gold Saucer tomorrow” he had told her. “Sounds like fun,” she'd answered, “I hear you can win materia at the Chocobo races there.” “You’re sixteen,” Reeve reminded her, horrified. “And you’re a cat,” she said, as if that was all the conclusion the conversation needed_ ).

Back in the dry dock, Aeris seemed to have scored some final victory over the Captain’s protests, the engineer turning his growling attention on his friend who owned the workshop.

“Don’t do anything terrible to my baby while I’m away,” he barked at the man, who laughed and threw him an oil-stained rag to clean his hands. 

“You already painted her pink, asshole. Nothing more I can do.” 

“Hey! She looks _good_. Am I right, Vince?” 

As if being recalled from somewhere far away, the former Turk blinked owlishly at him a few times, “As you say, Cid.” 

“Attaboy!” 

And they were off. 

\---

As with the buggy, the oversized moogle was ill suited to riding in the main compartment of the Gold Saucer transport. 

While the station staff were working out how to make it fit into the storage compartment with the rest of the luggage packed by the various travelers from Costa del Sol, the Shinra boat to Junon was approaching port and demanding the bulk of Reeve’s attention as he collected himself and prepared to debark. 

When Cait Sith did finally make his way into the main cabin of the transport the interior was as overblown and ostentatious as everything else relating to the Gold Saucer, boasting plush bench seats with various personalizing components – gadgets that Aeris and Tifa were already examining the settings for by the time Cait Sith made it inside the transport and the massive vehicle began to rumble out of the station. Reeve directed the little cat to dodge around the feet of a tolerant attendant serving cocktails to some of the rowdier vacationers in the front of the cabin and dashed to where the back half had been reserved for AVALANCHE. 

In front of the two women busy discovering ‘individual climate control zones’, Yuffie was already moaning at the initial movements of the transport as it lurched out of town and toward the open plains south of the resort areas. She pressed her face into Cloud’s shoulder, completely ignoring his encouragement to “Look out the window, it’s better.” 

“C’mon cat, over here,” he allowed the robot’s attention to be drawn to the opposite side of the alley where Barret gestured him over, looking sheepish, “Everyone’ll be happier if it’s you that has to share with me, little guy.” 

Reeve directed the cat to hop onto the small space left over on the bench not already occupied by Barret, and realized that it was true – the transport was luxurious and larger than life, but Barret was larger again. The man didn’t seem to acknowledge his own size often, except perhaps when some looming was called for (something Reeve had now experienced first-hand and was prepared to concede was quite effective), and it was certainly the first time he’d seemed apologetic about it.

He wondered what Barret had been like as a young man... if he was always so confident or if he needed time to grow into his skin, and when that had happened.

Any other thought he might have had were interrupted by a sudden loud snore from behind them. 

Reeve stretched the little cat onto its toes to peer over the back of the plush seating. Directly behind, and also taking a row to himself, Red XIII had his nose pressed to the window, puffing at the scenery as it went by. Behind the Cosmo Beast, Vincent was crowded against the window as Cid slept obtrusively across most of the transport’s rear bench – the tireless energy the pilot invested into retrofitting the Tiny Bronco clearly having evaporated almost as quickly as they were away from it.

The man in red stared steadfastly at the scenery outside, ignoring the bemused stares from the sets of eyes checking for signs of agitation that might predict the emergence of his demons. 

\---

To Reeve’s discomfort, the helicopter scheduled to pick him up from Junon was piloted by two of Heidegger’s Turks. 

A group of Turks, he felt, was the second worst number of Turks to have to deal with (surpassed only by meeting a single one, possibly in a dark alley where accountability couldn’t follow, if the rumours were true). 

“Gentlemen,” he greeted them as he passed off his luggage to the ground crew in exchange for a headset, “To what do I owe the pleasure?” 

“Heidegger wants to see you first thing,” Reno supplied, coming out of his skin with the barely contained energy his partner was so lacking, “Wants to brief you in person before everything goes down at the Saucer.” 

He should have been more uncomfortable, he supposed, as the machine zipped erratically through the air guided by Reno’s questionable piloting – but his mind was still largely preoccupied with the movements of AVALANCHE on the other end of the neural link. At any rate, Rude seemed as happy as Reeve was himself to make the trip in silence, letting Reno’s chatter flow out into the night unmarked. 

He _should_ have been more uncomfortable – but the cat at the other end of the link was tucked close beside Barret with the man’s giant hand covering half the cat’s torso without effort. He should have been more hurt, too, by the sting of recent rejection there – but the feeling of safety that traveled across his connection to the cat didn’t seem to be at all phased by such practical concerns.

Soon he was in a half doze, suspended somewhere above the Midgar mountains and somewhere between the man and the cat, as Gold Saucer shuttle made its ponderous way toward the Corel mountains and the helicopter blasted through the night toward the Shinra building. He barely stirred when the Turks disembarked to supervise at the refueling outpost in the halfway to Midgar, waving Rude away impatiently when the man tried to offer him a bottle of water and drifting back into the cat. 

He was jostled fully awake when the chopper dropped roughly onto the helipad atop the Shinra building in the first grey light of Midgar dawn. With his sudden alert was able to see the snickering redhead in the front taking rather too much enjoyment from having woken both him and the other Turk quite abruptly with what was probably an intentionally graceless landing. 

He pulled off the headset and dropped it onto the seat as the propellers eased to a halt, and hopped down to the concrete, yawning and stretching as he did. 

As the Turks handed off control of the vehicle to the waiting team, he wandered over to the main doors, turning his attention to Cait Sith as he did. 

In the shuttle, the cat was sprawled out across Barret’s stomach where the man had slumped in his sleep (when did that happen?). He raised the little cat carefully – reluctantly – and slipped from under the warm hand on his back to observe the remainder of the team. 

Across the aisle no one had slept – Yuffie’s motion sickness still the most insistent presence in the cabin. Her unwilling coach patted her back awkwardly while pointing out landmarks through the window and shooting desperate glances over his shoulder to the two women behind him. 

At the most recent of what Reeve suspected had been many such imploring looks, Aeris cast a healing spell on the teenager, whose moaning briefly subsided with a coughing hiccup. 

“Cloud used to get the worst motion sickness,” Tifa remarked, mostly to Yuffie, but glancing at Cait Sith in acknowledgement of his new alertness, “He’d never come out of town with any of us further than he could walk. He got left behind a lot...” 

“Hn,” Cloud agreed, looking distinctly uncomfortable, and pointed to a new landmark out the window as the transport sped along – sharp crags marking a peak of the surrounding mountain range. 

“What will you do it they try to keep you at the Gold Saucer, Cait?” Aeris asked suddenly, and he turned his attention to her. 

“I...” he realized he had no idea – had made no story or contingency for that, “I don’t know.” 

“Do you get homesick for it?” Tifa asked him, and Reeve felt distinctly like she wasn’t directing the question entirely at the Cait Sith robot. 

“Sometimes,” Reeve lied, peddling as fast as he could and hoping that something would happen to change the course of the conversation. 

The thought that his little avatar might be expected to stay at the Gold Saucer, even hypothetically, filled him with a strange panic that his groggy, jetlagged mind had trouble pinning to only his role as an intelligence operative. 

His tension must have been more obvious than he wanted, because as the little cat bristled at the nebulous threat of being separated from these people who he wasn’t supposed to care about, the man behind him started and sat up suddenly, looking around in disorientation for a moment before subsiding, “Ahh, sorry cat. Hope I didn’t wake you.” 

The generalized worry he felt narrowed into a directed alarm that the cat must have found its way into Barret’s lap while he himself was dozing, and he sent a fervent hope out to any gods that might be listening that he hadn’t done anything more incriminating than getting too comfortable. 

“Didn’t wake me,” Reeve answered through the cat, then wondered what that must have sounded like to the rest of AVALANCHE. Did they think he slept? Really slept, or went into sleep mode? Had he even had a conversation with any of them about it? 

He tried to remember through the fog of weeks juggling two lives in different time zones, and found that most of it was a blur while away from his office and his AVALANCHE files. 

Barret’s hand dropped onto the cat’s head and ruffled its ears before turning his attention to the window, “Mountains here still smell like home. Didn’t realize how bad I missed that, in Midgar.” 

Reeve’s relief at having the subject change away from the robot’s behaviour was replaced by an awareness that the manufacture of the robot hadn’t included olfactory sensors.

Missing it for the first time, he realized he badly wanted to know what the Corel Mountains smelled like. And that he didn’t like how invested that probably meant he was in the man beside him. 

“What is it like?” he asked, pushing all those thoughts away. 

When Barret fixed him with a questioning expression, he elaborated, “Robot cat. No sense of smell.” 

“Ah, sorry little guy. Wasn’t thinking.” He heaved a sigh, and looked back out the window, but his hand found its way back to the top of the cat’s head, and stayed there. 

In Midgar, Reeve reached to cover the feeling with his own hand, pausing there until he noticed the Turks approaching, Reno fixing him with an odd look. 

He followed through the motion in a pantomime of adjusting his hair and fell into step behind them through the halls of the Shinra building toward the elevator banks. 

On the other side of the world, Barret spoke again after a moment of rumination. 

“Smells like cold air. Fresh, you know? And dust, like clay in the desert. Before the reactor was installed, in the coal mining days, that had a smell to it too... The dust and the burning coal would get into your clothes and into your skin after a while,” Barret paused, looked at the others then back out the window, and something in his voice made Reeve wonder if he wasn’t speaking more to himself than to anyone else, “You always knew a man was from Corel. You could be proud of it. The work you did with your hands meant something.”

Something twinged in Reeve’s chest, a flash of fierce affection in spite of himself. 

There was something, Reeve thought, _intrinsic_ about the draw of the man. Not just attraction (although there was plenty of that too), but something about his energy and conviction. Whatever their ideological differences might have been, Reeve couldn’t help admiring Barret’s commitment to and confidence in his values. Reeve himself had never lacked drive – his position was proof enough of it – but it was hard to imagine Barret subjecting himself to Shinra’s experimental programs (to the surgeries and the weeks of recovery following the neural implants, missing the entire of the first month of his new position while the team transitioned without him and he hid in dark rooms with the strained misery of a brain injury). He wondered if, positions reversed, Barret would have had the courage and ingenuity to save Sector 7... 

In Midgar, he followed the Turks into the elevator, mind barely tracking their progress through the building until Reno snapped his fingers a few times obnoxiously near to Reeve’s face.

“What?” he asked, feeling his face pull into a frown even as he jerked away from the hand too near in front of his eyes. 

“You’re all spaced out, man. You with us?”

“AVALANCHE,” Reeve answered, tapping his temple illustratively and feeling a weird thrill of not needing to make excuses – not about the cat, at least. 

“Thought they were still on the transport?” the Turk was still looking at him strangely, but Reeve found with some pleasure that he didn’t particularly give a shit. Maybe Mukki _had_ rubbed off on him...

He shrugged but dedicated more of his attention to the downward glide of the elevator along the length of the building. 

“42nd hospitality?” He asked, noticing the button lit on the broad panel. 

“Have some guests,” Rude supplied as if that explained everything. 

Reno rocked on the balls of his feet, glancing briefly at the second Turk before some agitation forced him to explain further unprompted, “Heidegger wants you to meet with them before he briefs you on the operation at the Gold Saucer. Said it’ll help you keep perspective on the mission. Ha!” 

The laugh sounded as the speakers dinged their arrival on the 42nd and Reno nearly bounced out of the elevator, shifting from foot to foot with some inner excitement even as his partner fixed him with a look of exasperation. 

“This way,” Rude pushed past both of them to lead the way through ornate halls designed to wow corporate competitors and visiting dignitaries. 

Almost at the further corner of the floor, a door was locked with a biometric seal that disengaged when Rude pressed his thumb to it and gestured for Reeve to enter. 

A startled female yelp sounded as Reeve entered, making him frown into the darkened room. He scanned the space in the light let in from the hallway and was about to ask exactly what the hell was going on when someone hit the overheads. 

A middle-aged woman, vaguely familiar, was standing from an armchair on the far side of the room. Her face was distorted by a nasty black eye that he had to assume was the product of one of the men behind him, and Reeve’s stomach again turned in distaste at the methods allowable, when they were used by the Turks. 

His displeasure shifted however when a small child moved from beneath a pile of blankets on the adjacent couch. 

The child, he realized like a punch in the gut, he _did_ recognize. 

Marlene looked blearily around the assembled adults before her eyes fixed on the men standing behind Reeve, and she began to cry. 

With a sick feeling of the world slipping out from under him Reeve barely heard himself saying, “Oh no...”


	26. Chapter 26

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter warning for (canon-typical) strong language and violence

“What the hell is this,” Reeve turned on the Turks behind him even as Marlene’s cries escalated into hiccoughing sobs. 

“Thought Heidegger told you already, insurance against AVALANCHE,” Reno answered him. The man met Reeve’s gaze evenly, none of the buoyant energy he normally projected, although he did bounce his nightstick on his shoulder in what seemed to be some implicit warning. 

_Tap, tap, tap,_ don’t get ideas buddy, that could have _consequences_.

“Is this...” Reeve shook his head, a sudden sick suspicion resting in his gut, “Why wasn’t I consulted about this? Why did this happen while I was out of town?” 

Reno sighed, “You know... you _like_ people, Reeve,” _tap, tap, tap,_ “It’s a serious character flaw.” 

Reeve turned back to where the woman was gathering Marlene to her, trying to stop the little girl crying while still glaring at the men in the room. 

He wondered what the hell he was supposed to do about any of this. It was... unfathomable. 

_There were women and children in Sector 7 too,_ his mind whispered to him, not very helpfully. 

He... had to tell Barret. He had to tell AVALANCHE. Had to get Marlene and the woman out of here and somewhere far away from Heidegger and the Turks. 

He was distantly aware of Reno running a monologue in the background, telling him that it was nothing personal. That they needed him out of town until the job was done and there was no danger of him putting out an alarm, to AVALANCHE or to any of their allies in Midgar. Nothing personal, you see, just trying to make life easier for everyone involved. _Tap, tap, tap._

“What did the President say? Did he agree to this?” Reeve accused over his shoulder, thinking already of going directly to Rufus’s offices, to camp outside if he needed to. Surely, there was some mistake, the Turks acting outside their authority like mad dogs given too much lead. 

“...” Rude opened his mouth as if to speak. Closed it again. 

“Two birds one stone, I think he said,” Reno supplied. _Tap... tap._

Marlene had wrapped herself in the woman’s skirt, face a mess of snot and terror that Reeve didn’t know how to deal with. It was the first time he’d seen her in person, but would have recognized her even without the AVALANCHE files open on his desk for the past months. Knew her from the way she lived at the forefront of her father’s thoughts and worries. He had to fix this. 

“Marlene,” Reeve stepped forward, hesitated as the woman’s arm pushed the little girl further behind her and stepped forward. 

“You stay away from her,” she warned him, and even as he raised his hands in what he hoped was a pacifying manner she raised her own as if to defend herself – by force if necessary. 

It was all the excuse the Turk was waiting for, and the night stick was approaching at speed from the corner of Reeve’s eye. 

He threw his arm up without thinking, registering as if from far away the sharp pain and _smack_ of impact as he met it forcefully from the other direction. 

He spun on the Turk, who glared at him.

“... Damn, Reeve, we’re just here to keep the executives safe,” Reno sounded petulant, but there was an edge of worry in his voice, backing away quickly with his eyes on Reeve’s arm, clearly checking for damage, “Not really letting me do my job like that...” 

“I’ll let you know when I need protection from unarmed women and children,” Reeve felt anger and adrenaline bubbling in his chest, the world in sharp focus as numbing pain crept up his arm. It was shocking, to be struck in such a way, and he had a vague thought that he might not have reacted as quickly or as stoically without the experience of Cait Sith. Ironic, that. 

Reno shuffled but continued to glare at him. 

“Get out,” Reeve ordered them, ignoring the pain in his arm, “Both of you, now.” 

Reno glanced over his shoulder at the second Turk, who gave him a small nod toward the door but didn’t follow him out when he went.

“I stay,” Rude said firmly as the door slid shut behind the redhead. 

Reeve puffed an angry breath through his nose, but nodded and turned back to the pair of hostages. 

“I’m so sorry for what’s happening to you,” he told the woman, “And I’m going to do everything in my power to put it right as quickly as possible.” 

The Turk made a sound behind him that he ignored. 

If he had expected the woman to be impressed with his sudden heroics, he was disabused of the idea quickly. The squaring of her shoulders and proud tilt of her chin showed only the slightest break in the hostility she aimed at him and the man behind him. Reeve ignored her disdain and dropped to his knees, not sure how to deal with children but with some recollection that you were supposed to talk to them on their own level. 

“Marlene? Hey, Marlene?” she shrank farther behind the woman’s skirt with a fresh wail. _How does she have any breath left?_ “You’re going to be safe here. I’m going to make sure of it. Everything is going to be alright and your Dad is going to be here in no time to pick you up. Okay?” 

He ignored another unhappy sound from Rude, and hoped desperately that he was in fact telling her the truth. 

The child’s face emerged from behind handfuls of fabric, uncertain and tear streaked. 

“You know Papa?” she asked him between the tiny hiccoughs that had replaced her sobbing.

“Yes, I know Papa. He always comes through, right?” 

Marlene nodded vigorously. For a moment Reeve thought she had calmed down, then all at once her face crumpled again and she ran forward to throw herself against Reeve’s unexpecting chest. For a frozen moment he did nothing, turning his face up to the woman in front of him who answered him with an unsympathetic ‘get on with it’ expression. 

He wrapped his arms awkwardly around the crying child’s small frame, acutely aware of how she left trails of tears and snot on his jacket. He patted her on the back and wondered what the hell responsible adults usually did in these situations. 

He scooped her up as he stood (the child warm and squirming and so much heavier than he expected) and passed her to the woman.

“It will be okay,” he told both of them as Marlene turned her messy face into the woman’s shoulder and she in turn began rocking and bouncing the little girl around as if she was a much smaller child, “Please, I had no knowledge that this was going to happen to you. I’ll do everything in my power to see that Shinra releases you as quickly as possible.” 

At the word “Shinra” Marlene let out a fresh peal of sobs and the woman glared daggers at him, even as she bounced and hushed the girl in her arms. 

Hit with a fresh wave of guilt and shame, he searched himself for a handkerchief to offer her only to find his pockets empty. After a moment’s consideration, he pulled out his pocket square, already the worse for wear after the child had pressed her face into his chest, and tried to press it into the girl’s hand. 

The woman quirked an eyebrow at him (he hoped with some positive appraisement although he doubted it under the circumstances), but Marlene stopped sobbing to take the embossed silk in both hands, distress distracted to small sniffles as she examined the bright colored fabric. 

“You should probably go while she’s quiet,” the woman told him, and Reeve gratefully took the offered escape. 

Rude was frowning at him as he turned toward the door, warning, “No leaks.”

Reeve glared back, “This isn’t over.” 

He pushed past the Turk waiting outside the door and headed to his office, sighing as he did over the ruins of his jacket, and wondering what the hell he was supposed to do now that Shinra had hostages as well as a spy. 

\---

He held his temper until he made it back to his office and slammed the door behind himself 

He’d been ignoring alerts from the cat since moments after he had identified Marlene in the small room on the 42nd floor. He was not able, not prepared to deal with both problems at once.

What the hell was he was supposed to say to them? Something, certainly. There was no way that he could withhold from AVALANCHE that Marlene had been taken hostage. No way he could hide that from Barret, no matter what his role at Shinra might dictate. 

Even putting all personal feelings aside, it was the right thing to do. 

He strode into the center of his office, then stopped. 

Was it the right thing to do, though? Stuck in a Gold Saucer transport on the other side of the planet where they couldn’t do a damn thing except worry... was it the right time, was it the _fair_ time, to share that information? 

He let his consciousness slip into the cat as he began pacing the floor of his office.

Clearly the cat was the subject of some concern among AVALANCHE. His abrupt absence had been noticed, the activity sent over the neural link ignored in his distress. 

“Cait! You okay?” 

“What’s happening, cat?” 

“Cait Sith?” 

He peered through the cat’s eyes at a collection of concerned faces.

“What...” he started, cleared his throat in Midgar, the impulse turning into a strange scratching purr on the other side of the world, “What did I miss?” 

“That’s what we want to know,” Cloud answered him, frowning. 

“You checked out like in Costa del Sol,” Barret supplemented. 

“I...” Reeve’s mind spun. What would happen if he reported Marlene’s situation directly? He’d blow his cover for one thing, but that seemed inevitable anyway. He’d scare the hell out of everyone while they couldn’t do a damned thing about it. It would almost certainly compromise his position in the Cait Sith project. Possibly his position at Shinra altogether. 

What would happen to the hostages if he wasn’t there? 

He thought of the woman’s black eye and how casually the Turk had been willing to use force on unarmed prisoners. 

“Sorry,” the little cat chirped, needing time to _think_ , time to figure out what the hell to do, “Must have been a programming glitch.” 

“Keeps happening... You need a cure spell or something?” Barret was frowning at him from close range, already reaching for the materia paired to work on the robots. 

“No,” the cat shook its head. He needed time and _space_ , but there was little of that to go around in the transport. Little of it in to go around inside his head, for that matter, “No cure.” 

He let the little cat slip onto the floor of the transport. He needed the space to think. He needed to make a plan. He needed to get Marlene out of the Shinra building _immediately_ , not in the weeks it could take AVALANCHE to make their way back to Midgar. 

He paced the floor of his office increasingly frantic, rubbing absently at the bridge of his nose as he did. Without thinking he sent the little robot running up the aisle to the front of the transport, dropping to all fours automatically for speed. It crashed into the drink trolley pushed by one of the attendants and was followed by an alarmed cry and the sound of breaking glass. 

He hardly noticed the disruption his avatar was causing, back and forth and back across his office trying to figure out the answer. How to _fix_ things. 

He _was_ a fixer. He had built a career on it. Supervised the physical and social infrastructure for the entire of the world’s largest metropolis. 

At the end of a lap around the office, Reeve wound his arm back and punched the wall so hard he saw stars. 

His shout of rage and frustration emerged as a howl from the cat as it reached the front of the transport, ran out of space, turned to run back the way it had come as a mass of strangers tried to catch it and flee from it at the same time. 

He needed a solution, he needed for things to go fucking _right_ in a way they hadn’t done for months. With Cait Sith and with Shinra and with Sector 7 and with Marlene...

His arm ached, from his bleeding knuckles to where Reno had hit him with the night stick. The pain sharpened his focus into an urgency to take some kind of action. 

The cat barely avoided knocking the trolley again as it blasted toward the rear of the transport, leapt across Cid to bounce off the rear wall before turning back, ignoring the captain’s shout as 30 kilograms of robot dropped onto his legs before heading back for the front of the transport. 

The cat was already accelerating when someone grabbed its fluttering cape, and Reeve choked at the mirrored sensation as the fabric brought the cat to an abrupt halt, yowling furiously. 

A second later the cat was grabbed by the scruff and lifted into the air, making its controller writhe in turn as the sensation mapped across his neck and shoulders – knew that it was just a phantom sensation of something happening far away but too tightly wound to differentiate. 

“Cait! Hey, Cait, stop!” 

Tifa was in front of him, restraining the robot’s arms by its sides and watching him with worry and sympathy that he didn’t deserve. 

“What the hell is going on?” 

It was Cloud holding the cat, he realized, roughly suspending it above the floor of the transport even as Tifa restrained it. 

Reeve heaved a sigh and tried to think. 

He should tell them everything. 

It probably wouldn’t help, as inaccessibly distant as they were. 

“Programming glitch,” he told them again. 

Tifa frowned, and Cloud sighed. 

“How to we fix it?” Cloud asked him. 

“... I’ll run a diagnostic.” 

As easy as that the cat was lifted up, still by its scruff, and dropped into Yuffie’s lap. 

The teenager moaned even as Cloud instructed, “Hold onto him. And keep looking out the window.” 

“It’s too dark,” the teenager protested, but wrapped her arms around the robot like the plush toy he was designed to resemble, dropping her face onto the top of its head. 

Reeve was almost too rattled to register any of it. 

In his office, he stared at the back of his hand, third knuckle bleeding slowly where he had torn the skin. 

He couldn’t remember punching anything before. He must have, surely, in a schoolyard at some point at least, but could find no recollection of it. He wasn’t a violent man – not some kind of testosterone charged fool who solved problems with his fists. He prided himself on it. 

He flexed his fingers and cringed as the bleeding knuckle moved strangely. It didn’t hurt as badly as the ache in his arm where Reno had connected with his fucking night stick.

_What the hell was Reno thinking?_

Probably wasn’t, Reeve decided. Any more than he himself had been when he punched the wall. 

He slipped free from and discarded his ruined suit jacket then rolled up the sleeve of his shirt to inspect his arm, already purpling and swollen. 

He sighed and made his way to his desk, fishing in a drawer for a piece of cure materia that he kept there.

He would have to make some kind of decision about what to do about Marlene and AVALANCHE. He had to tell them, of course. He couldn’t _not_ tell Barret that his daughter was being held by Shinra’s top set of thugs.

But there was probably a right way. A right time. Possibly after the situation was already resolved and would cause the least distress for everyone involved. He’d see Heidegger first thing and get everything resolved by end of business. Civilly and Peacefully. They were both professionals and gentlemen, after all, whatever personal differences they might have. 

The cure spell sparkled uselessly over his aching arm – he wasn’t sure why he’d expected differently, really, but it was worth a shot – and cursed that he should have accepted the cure-all when it was offered. Too late now without raising suspicion. 

In the Gold Saucer transport, an attendant was making her way back to the assembled members of AVALANCHE. She looked between Barret and Cloud a few times, then clearly decided that Cloud looked more open to scolding. 

“I’m sorry, sir,” she told him, “But you will need to keep your pets under control or we’ll have to ask you to keep them in cages.” 

“Sorry about that,” Cloud bit out, then frowned at the little cat still wrapped in the iron grip of Yuffie’s motion-sickness, “We won’t let it happen again.” 

“We can pay for damages,” Aeris chimed in from behind them. 

The attendant sniffed and disappeared back toward the front of the cabin. 

Reeve directed the cat to stare out the window at the falling dark and began his day in Midgar.


	27. Chapter 27

Heidegger was curiously ambivalent both to Reeve’s objections about Shinra holding hostages, and to learning that the situation had not yet been reported to AVALANCHE.

“I don’t think you’re grasping the concept of a credible threat, Reeve,” he said with frustrating amiability, “You have to tell them about it or it doesn’t work.”

He went on to categorically refuse any proposals for the release of Marlene or (as Reeve had confirmed earlier that morning) Aeris’s adopted mother, Elmyra. 

When Reeve finished voicing his protest (less calmly than he might have hoped, still wound tight from panic and adrenaline), Heidegger continued as if he hadn’t spoken.

“You’re good at your job, Reeve. And people like you here. You’re well respected by your department,” here, Heidegger placed a sympathetic hand on his shoulder, patted it a few times in a _there’s a good fellow_ kind of way that ignored Reeve’s clenched jaw and rapid breathing. Continued, “But please keep yourself under control a little better next time, hey? Don’t forget that _everyone_ is fungible. You understand.” 

“I...” Reeve stared at him, trying to parse the man’s meaning through his alarm that the meeting was not going at all the way he had anticipated. 

Slow to track the implication of his fellow executive’s words, he was aided along when Heidegger lifted a meaningful eyebrow at him and at once the hand grasping his shoulder was uncomfortably tight. 

“Are you... threatening me?” 

“Reeve!” Heidegger gasped, giving every illusion of being deeply wounded, “We’re professionals here. I would never.” 

But at the same time he was pivoting to open a top drawer of his desk, extracting a small notecard that he pressed into Reeve’s hand. 

“We just like to... _cover our anatomy_ around here. You’ll learn once you’ve been on the executive a while. I have full trust in you.” 

The man patted his shoulder – friendly again – after Reeve accepted the card, smiled beneficently, “You know you can come to me with your concerns at any time. Don’t hesitate, hey?” 

The bastard was laughing when Reeve turned the card face up, and he almost wasn’t surprised to see his mother’s Sector 5 address, the generous single-family cottage offered to high ranking Shinra officials. 

Reeve left the meeting with Heidegger feeling numb and sick to his stomach, not even waiting for the man to stop his horrible laughing. 

\---

He passed the rest of the day in a haze, the trip down to Hojo’s medical center to have his broken hand wrapped (grateful to avoid Hojo, with whom his appointment wasn’t scheduled until later in the week), and the meetings with his managers while he was brought up to speed on the department progress. The hours went past like a terrible chore, making excuses for his injured arm (still alternately throbbing and numb), and for why he didn’t resolve it directly with a quick cure spell.

At the other end of his link to the cat, the world outside the Gold Saucer shuttle was still dark as the machine moved at speed across the countryside, a hulking and unstoppable forward force carrying AVALANCHE, and his little avatar with them, to where he would need to first convince them to liberate the Keystone, and then convince them to hand it over to Shinra. 

Occasionally, Yuffie twitched and moaned, fading in and out of sleep and gripping the little cat more tightly while she made unhappy noises into its fur. The phantom impression of her grip through the neural link added a nagging sense of claustrophobia to everything he did through the day.

The end of the business day in Midgar offered no relief when it finally arrived, as by that time the transport was less than an hour out from Corel and the entire of the team there was twitchy and miserable after the long confinement.

At some point, the cat had been passed back to sit between Tifa and Aeris, who maintained a grip on it in turn – still clearly concerned about it causing another incident with whatever glitch it was purportedly experiencing – although they hid the task more gracefully than Yuffie had bothered to under the illusion of offering simple affection. 

Under the circumstances, Reeve was uncertain which option was worse. 

Returning to his office after his final meeting of the day, he stopped in the antechamber. 

His personal assistant – a holdover from his predecessor’s staff but, he was coming to learn, an efficient and amiable woman all the same – hadn’t finished her day yet. He asked her to have flowers sent to his mother.

“Any special occasion?” she asked him. 

He paused, “... No. No occasion.”

“Only, they’ll ask for a note on the card,” she prompted him. 

He sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose, “No, just... ask them to say that I’m thinking of her.” 

He knew he should call. 

There wasn’t any _time_. 

He shut the office door behind him, abandoned his briefcase beside his desk, and dropped onto the fashionably uncomfortable sofa. 

Then, he dropped into the cat. 

\---

The Gold Saucer ropeway station was one of many Dio’s many quirks. Something to do with creating the impression of being lifted up and away from the mundanities of the world below. Every trip to the Saucer had to begin with the guests being _elevated_. Whether to better appreciate Dio’s grandeur or to be distracted from such worldly things as their diminishing bank balances was anyone’s guess. 

It was the only way for guests to arrive at the Gold Saucer, and it required a short trip – led by nervously hovering Gold Saucer staff – through the ruins of North Corel from where the shuttle station stopped on the far side of town. To the best of Reeve’s understanding the entire thing was the result of a zoning dispute finally won by the local population, and a point of some anguish for the Saucer’s extravagant owner.

“I don’t understand why it’s like this,” Yuffie complained, some spring back in her step to be back on solid ground, “You’d think they’d clear up the tourist areas, at least...”

As distracted as he was, Reeve still didn’t miss the way the group collectively flinched and glanced toward Barret. Trailing the group, Cait Sith was situated to see the shift in the man – already tense and watchful from the time the ruins of the town came into sight

“People wouldn’t stand for it,” Barret told her, calmer than Reeve, at least, had expected. Certainly calmer than the last time he’d seen Barret in Corel, what seemed like an impossibly long time ago, “Might not be much left here, but the people are proud. They won’t take money for nothing and they won’t be erased to make the tourists comfortable.” 

“Yeah, but...” Yuffie’s protest was cut off when Tifa touched her arm with a significant look. 

It occurred to Reeve that he probably wasn’t imagining, the way that the core of AVALANCHE, the people who had left Midgar together, had formed a half circle with Barret in the center, either by instinct or some unspoken agreement. 

Reeve had seen the files, knew that Barret had left the town under bad circumstance, heard the whispered conversation around the campfire (often contextual, half understood in his newness) about the situation with Dyne and Marlene and the half of the town that had been caught in the crossfire following insurgent attacks on the reactor. He’d been able to extrapolate that Barret was carrying a considerable portion of the blame for the disaster in local opinion, although the man’s name had been nowhere in the published list of insurgents responsible for Shinra’s counter-measures. 

Sometimes, people under pressure just needed the easiest line of causality. To see an event as the sum of all its parts and then find the easiest target. Corel had blamed Barret. Barret had blamed Shinra. 

Reeve wondered, now, exactly how near the situation had been to the one in Sector 7. 

He took the moogle closer to fill in the circle that had formed around the former leader of AVALANCHE. Guiltily, knowing that what he was about to do ( _was already complicit in_ ) was worse again, but unable to fight the impulse when the walk through the ruins of Corel seemed to gather like a tangible weight on Barret’s shoulders. 

He was preoccupied enough that it took him by surprise when Cloud dropped all at once to his knees. 

“Cloud!”

The circle broke and reformed around the blond man, Barret still at the center but this time with purpose. He grabbed Cloud’s shoulder and held him upright as he tried to curl in on himself. 

“C’mon, Spike, what’s going on?” 

Around them, tour guides crowded forward to see what had happened to their charges, rushing to offer water and shade. Tifa responded by holding them back, asking for space, please, space – their friend was going to be fine if they could just get some _space_. 

“Feels like we’re going the wrong way,” Reeve heard the slow, quiet response picked up by Cait Sith’s microphones, “I feel like we need to go _south_.” 

“Okay,” Barret told him, dragging him to his feet, “We’re gonna go south. We’re absolutely gonna go south. But we’ve gotta do this one thing first. That gonna be okay?” 

“I...” Cloud bent forward, held his head. Probably would have fallen again without the bigger man’s support under his arm, “I think so. I’ll _make_ it okay.” 

Barret made a noise of acknowledgement, pulled him more solidly onto his feet, “Good enough. C’mon then, wasting daylight.” 

The group got moving again, newly with Barret out front, still guiding Cloud with a hand on his upper arm while Tifa continued trying to calm the Gold Saucer employees who were clearly still worried about some kind of lawsuit or duty of care. 

Seeing Cloud go to pieces was... rattling, on top of everything else Reeve had been forced to process that day. 

Barret, at least, seemed more at ease after finding a job to do. 

In his office, Reeve sighed. Heidegger had seemed to think that the right course of action was to reveal as quickly as possible that Marlene and Elmyra were in custody – and by extension to reveal his own role in that. 

Not very long ago, it had been precisely what he had wanted – to stop juggling convenient lies and trying to maintain a cover story. To have some sort of balance between his life in Midgar and his life with AVALANCHE. But... not at the cost that Shinra was introducing. Not to replace subterfuge with extortion. 

By the time they got to the ropeway station, Cloud seemed to have recovered his footing, although Barret continued to guide him purposefully through the process of securing passage for the party. 

In the pause Aeris found her way over to Cait Sith, leaning across the moogle to scratch the little cat behind his ears. 

“How are you holding up, Cait?” she asked, “No more glitches?” 

“Everything’s fine, Miss Aeris,” Reeve lied, and hated how comforting her concern was when he was about to tear the world from under her. Hated that he couldn’t quite stop the cat from pressing into the hand that ruffled its fur while he tried to find some solid ground under his own feet after his day in Midgar. 

“That’s good to hear,” she nodded, then gave him an appraising look, “Funny though.” 

“Funny?” he echoed. 

“You normally only purr for Barret,” she answered. Her fingers moved to tickle under the robot’s chin. 

Reeve scratched, suddenly frantic, at the illusion of touch that the neural link echoed beneath his beard. 

He hadn’t been aware the cat had been purring _at all_. 

While the group waited to start the final part of their trip to the Saucer, he couldn’t help turning his attention back to where Cloud had been shepherded onto a bench between Barret and Tifa. The cat’s AI picked out Barret’s voice from the surrounding noise. 

“You know, I resented it at first,” the man was telling Cloud, “When you took over control of AVALANCHE. But all the shit we’ve seen since then... You can have it, man. I’m too far out of my depth here. We’re just gonna help you best we can.” 

Cloud was nodding along, still pale and shaken and looking impossibly small with Barret’s arm over his shoulders

After the group had embarked and were being lifted up and away from the ruins of Corel, Reeve stood and walked to his desk. 

There was a non-descript manila folder there, dropped off earlier in the day by Reno. The Turk had been restless and twitchy in spite of his night piloting the helicopter, not hiding his appraisement of Reeve’s arm, clearly trying to decide exactly _how_ much trouble he was in for assaulting one of the executives. 

Inside, there was a single phone number, one he had been given a verbal instruction to dial when AVALANCHE was approaching the Gold Saucer. 

He dialed it, and Elena answered within seconds. 

She was already at the Saucer, ensconced in the security room with the feed of every CCTV camera in the place. 

She told him the plan. 

In Midgar, he waited sleepless and half mad while the time crept inexorably toward sunrise. 

At the Gold Saucer, he waited until everyone had gone to their rooms for the night.

In Midgar, he took the burner phone that had been dropped off along with the Elena’s number and made his way to the room on the 42nd floor where Marlene and Elmyra were sleeping. 

At the Gold Saucer, he took the Keystone and went to meet Tseng.


	28. Chapter 28

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can’t believe this beast has finally made it past the Gold Saucer and through the big identity reveal. Thank you all so much for bearing with me this far. I believe this chapter also marks the third major departure from compilation canon. As some of you have already remarked, this fic is playing fast and loose with the On the Way to a Smile timeline, especially regarding Denzel and Ruvie. And since there’s considerable fuzziness about Denzel’s timeline between the book and the OVA anyway, well…

For the first time he could remember, Reeve walked off the job during business hours. 

After the long sleepless night of _waiting_ , followed by the horrible stretch of _doing_ , he couldn’t bring himself to sit through another day of exhaustedly pretending that everything was normal in Urban Planning and Development. 

He walked out of his office, shut the door behind himself, and from there was out of the building opposite the flow people arriving to begin their day for the Shinra Electric Power Company. Guided his car from the parking garage against the traffic and sailed toward his condo without noticing the drive. 

He had expected it to hurt. 

He’d known there was never going to be a good reception to the truth of Cait Sith’s identity. He thought he had braced himself for it. He had thought he was ready for the way that his little avatar was suddenly shut out entirely, for the furious, resentful response to his deception. 

He hadn’t been ready to be caught in the act while meeting Tseng. Certainly hadn’t expected the mad chase through the Gold Saucer before he was finally able to pass off the Keystone, and to be forced all at once – just as Heidegger had intended – to wake Marlene in the small hours of the night. 

To terrify the poor kid half out of her mind and frighten her father all the worse when her cries echoed across the distance between them, emerging from the moogle’s speakers from the other side of the world. 

He wasn’t prepared for the betrayal and horror in Barret’s features, how the strong man’s face was suddenly ashen even as he screamed and slammed the massive gun arm into the structure of the Saucer with vehemence that shook the floor beneath their feet. 

And he definitely wasn’t prepared for the wall of terrible, total silence that descended between AVALANCHE and the cat.

He had managed to get Marlene calm again before he left the suite she shared with Elmyra, although it had cost him another pocket square.

It was... easier, somehow, in spite of everything, to deal with the child’s distress instead of his own. Taking care of things was his job. He was... good at it. 

He arrived home in a daze. Unpacked his bags mechanically. Set aside the dry cleaning. Went into the kitchen to make coffee. 

He stared at the place on the floor where he had sat half the night when Cait Sith first ran with Red XIII through the Cosmo Canyon sunset.

There wouldn’t be any more of that, he supposed. 

He put the coffee on and went to check on his plants. 

\---

Convincing AVALANCHE to take the provided Gold Saucer transport back to Costa del Sol was a new problem as the team began to gather the next morning, solemn and serious in the hotel lobby. 

While much of the team had been won over quickly with the logic that if Shinra wanted to capture and arrest them, they had a perfectly good means of coercing their surrender already on hand. And that the transport would shave a week’s hard travel off their trip. And that, realistically speaking, they wouldn’t be hidden from Shinra for as long as Cait Sith was with them and broadcasting their GPS coordinates. 

Barret was having no part of it, and after brief consideration Cloud fell into agreement. 

“Not taking anything from Shinra,” Barret scowled, “Not money or favours, and we’re sure as hell never working for you again.” 

Reeve had been the subject of Barret’s anger before, of course. Knew exactly how imposing the man could be when he got his ire up. But for the first time it felt very _personal_. 

“Barret, please...”

The man looked at him, and for a moment, Reeve was almost convinced that Barret was waiting, hoping for the cat to say something that would make everything alright. 

Reeve had no idea what that was. 

“I never meant for it to be like this,” he said instead, sinking the little robot’s hands into the plush fur on top of the moogle and holding tight. Stared hard at the back of the little paws that had seemed, for a while, to really belong to some other part of himself, divorced from the realities of Midgar and Shinra. 

“The hell you didn’t,” Barret’s face slammed shut again, “Got my _daughter_ you son of a bitch.” 

“I’m sorry,” Reeve told him in the cat’s inappropriately cheerful tones. It wasn’t nearly enough. 

Eventually, Tifa was able to get the team on the same page and moving again – toward the ropeway station and the Gold Saucer shuttle, thankfully – but the heavy silence made clear that it wasn’t much of a victory. 

\---

After half a miserable day failing to catch up on missed sleep – disrupted each time as his consciousness wandered anxiously again and again to the cat, only to find the same wall of closed hostility waiting for him there – Reeve gave it up for a lost cause and padded back up the hall toward the kitchen. 

He wondered if leaving work had been a wasted gesture, the initial wave of _fuck it_ having receded and left behind the worry that he hadn’t left instructions for his managers or rescheduled any of his meetings. His assistant had called three times, leaving worried messages on the answering machine that floated across his home and further disturbed his broken attempts to sleep. 

Well, it wasn’t as if the Turks didn’t always seem to know where to find him these days, anyway. 

He took a cloth from the kitchen and began wandering with it, wiping beneath the plants where the neighbor’s teenager had overwatered them and left the puddles to dry. Sighed where one of the rings was clearly going to be permanent. 

After a while, Reeve tossed the cloth with the laundry and, staunchly not checking in on the cat, went to call his mother. 

“There you are!” she nearly shouted into the phone after picking up on the second ring. She sounded happy to hear from him. 

It was nice. It didn’t make up for Costa del Sol or Heidegger or the Turks or the Gold Saucer – certainly didn’t change anything that had happened with the hostages and with AVALANCHE and with _Barret_ – but it was good to hear a friendly voice. 

“Hi, mom,” he found himself beginning to smile, in spite of everything. 

“I’ve been trying to reach you for weeks! You don’t call your mother?” 

_Already,_ he smiled a little wider, “Had to go out of town on business, didn’t get a chance to tell you.” 

“Oh yes? Where to this time?” 

“Costa del Sol,” he told her, and listened to her fuss about the sun, and the water, and whether or not he had stayed in a safe area, and if he had remembered to use enough sunscreen. Carried on as if it had been her making the trip instead of him. He let it wash over him in a fog of normalcy he hadn’t experienced in weeks. 

“I got your flowers, by the way, they’re lovely,” she told him when she was done asking about the beach. He’d nearly forgotten that he’d asked his assistant to send them in everything that had happened, and felt a sudden sinking when it brought to the forefront of his mind exactly what had made him think of it. He was far from forgetting the barely-veiled threat from Heidegger ( _we cover our asses here at Shinra, Reeve – don’t forget it_ ), but the urgency had gotten lost in all the other more immediate disasters. 

“They were from somewhere new this time though,” she told him, “I hope nothing happened to the usual girl.” 

“The usual girl?” he echoed with a strange twist in his stomach. 

“Sweet girl. Always wears pink. Oh, I don’t expect you to know about it, Reeve, I’m sure everything’s fine.” 

He again fought the urge to turn his attention to the cat. As if he could confirm his suspicion just by peering through the robot, somehow look through the wall of silence and hostility that he would find there and know if he was right.

“Maybe she’s out of town,” he suggested. 

His mother grabbed at the idea and surprised him again, “Been a lot of traveling around lately... Speaking of, I’ve had a guest here for the last little while myself. I tried to call you while you were away.” 

“Guest?” 

“A young man about seven years old by the name of Denzel. No last name, at least none he’s telling me. Says his parents were Shinra employees in Sector 7 when...” 

“Oh hell,” Reeve breathed. 

“ _Language._ ” 

“Sorry,” Reeve pinched the bridge of his nose. It seemed sometimes like everything went back to Sector 7, “Have names for the parents? I can have them checked against the... well, the casualty lists.” 

“Able and Chloe,” she told him softly, as if trying not to be overheard. So, the boy was close and she didn’t want to upset him. 

Reeve scribbled the two names on a piece of notepaper and stared at them there. Wondered if it was possible that they were somewhere in the city, increasingly frantic, looking for the little boy lost in Sector 5 after the world came crashing down.

Not the way things had been going lately. 

His mother fell back into her patter after that, telling him about preparing the yard and garden for winter. That she was waiting for the glaziers to come by and give her a quote to replace a window. All the local gossip, and how some of the neighbors had decided to evacuate after the reactor attack – and how she was having no part of it. Asked him as ever how work was going, whether he was sleeping alright, whether he was eating enough, whether he was seeing anyone, and he ignored the questions like he always did. Like she expected him to do. 

“Call me more often,” she admonished him finally, “You’re so busy I never know when to call you. So call me, would you?” 

“Okay mom,” he agreed, felt the exasperated smile tugging again at the corners of his mouth in spite of himself, then frowned as a final thought occurred to him, “Hey, you haven’t noticed more security than usual around the area lately have you? More military personnel?” 

“Oh, Reeve,” she chided him as if he was slow, and he resisted the urge to react while waiting for her to get to the point, “since the reactor attacks there’s been security _everywhere_. People are scared. It makes them feel better.” 

“Of course,” he sighed. Heidegger didn’t even need an _excuse_ to have extra people watching the house in the current climate. 

“Look into those names, won’t you?” she prompted him, “A child this age needs his parents around.” 

He promised that he would do everything he could, and that he loved her. Those things were true. 

She answered by asking him if everything was okay – _really_ okay. 

He lied to her, and hung up the phone. 

\---

Finally unable to control the impulse – either from morbid curiosity or simply from weeks and months of habit – Reeve was soon letting his attention slip away to become the cat. 

Again, AVALANCHE had occupied the rearmost sections of the transport as it sped toward Costa del Sol, and again Cait Sith had been pulled onto one of the wide plush benches with Barret – but there was nothing friendly about the second trip. 

“Sit down and shut up,” Barret had told him harshly as he’d scooped the cat onto the bench then gestured pointedly to the spot where the little robot was expected to do exactly as instructed. 

So Cait Sith had sat, and had shut up, and had stayed that way, perched dejectedly on its feline haunches until well into the trip while the AI took control of swishing its tail and flicking its ears at intervals – a needless relic of its earlier subterfuge. The entire thing was so markedly different from the previous days it was hard to fathom that the other trip had ever happened at all. It seemed like some wild and feverish daydream, waking up pressed tightly against Barret – albeit through the experience of his robot avatar – and the associated feelings both of warmth and nervous embarrassment that had accompanied that... along with whatever other, fonder feelings Reeve might have been harbouring. 

Clearly, he wouldn’t have to worry about being in that situation again any time soon. 

Going after the man’s daughter, even by proxy, even if he hadn’t been aware of it... 

_A child this age needs his parents around,_ his mother had said. 

He thought about the little girl crying in the Shinra building. His feelings about that, at least, were unambiguous – and distinct from the intense, confused, _frustrating_ feelings that he had about her father. 

“Barret, I –”

“Told you to shut up.” 

“I know but I –”

“You’re testing your luck, cat,” Barret growled at him, and the full force of his stormy expression was turned on Cait Sith. 

Reeve swallowed hard and spoke anyway. 

“I think I can get you meetings with Marlene.”


	29. Chapter 29

Reeve finally slept not long after falling on the idea of keeping Marlene and Elmyra in touch with AVALANCHE, only to be awakened abruptly a few hours later - disoriented and suspended between the man and the cat as his mind reached out to Cait Sith across the ocean in the conviction that the robot’s AI had detected a threat. 

The cat’s AI was still peacefully scanning for stimulus and finding nothing out of the ordinary. 

When the quiet dark of the transport making its way through the night didn’t show any signs of trouble, he pulled himself back to his bedroom in Midgar to realize he had rolled onto his injured arm while tossing in his sleep. 

With Cait Sith’s identity revealed ( _cat out of the bag? Cait out of the bag?_ ) he no longer needed to conceal cure spells at the human end of the link, but it had somehow escaped his notice in everything else that had happened. 

As the cool relief of magic traveled over his aching hand and arm, seated at the kitchen island a few minutes later, he let his mind wander again to the cat. 

The spell that covered the little robot was bright in the dark cabin, casting blue light over the sleeping party. 

Well, mostly sleeping. 

He noticed Barret still awake, frowning at him through the fading light. 

“Couldn’t sleep?” he asked without thinking, and the man’s scowl deepened. 

“After the last time no one was watching you? Wasn’t planning on it.” 

“I -” he started to protest, then let the cat fall silent. _I never did anything to hurt you... right up until I did._

He was spared contemplating that line of thought further when Aeris appeared beside them and leaned against the side of the bench. 

“Were you hurt, Cait?” she asked him softly. 

Barret answered before Reeve could, “His name’s not Cait.” 

Reeve swallowed hard. The sense of wellbeing from the cure spell was fading quickly, and the strain of casting it beginning to make itself known. 

“I’m not damaged,” Reeve answered, spinning the robot back and forth on its feet to demonstrate its wellbeing. 

“Sit down and sit still,” Barret ordered him. Cait Sith sat. 

“And the person in Midgar?” Aeris ignored Barret, fixing the cat with a look that was more speculative than hostile. It was uncomfortably close to the look she’d given him before telling him that the cat was purring without his knowledge. 

Reeve flinched, “... Nothing serious.” 

“I see,” she answered, in a way that made Reeve wonder if she actually might. There was something unsettling about the way Aeris seemed to just _know_ things. It hadn’t been directed at the cat often enough to make him nervous before, but all at once it did. 

“I’m awfully sorry about what’s happening to your mother, Miss Aeris,” Reeve told her, speaking as he hadn’t dared to do in the glare of daylight and the fresh hostility from his companions, “I can get calls through for you, too, I think. Until she and Marlene are released, I mean.” 

Aeris shook her head, “I think I’d just cry if I spoke to her now. And there seems to be more than enough of that happening these days anyway.” 

Aeris reached out as if to pet the little cat’s ears then hesitated and pulled back her hand without touching him. 

“I’m not surprised Shinra took her, you know,” she shook her head, “They used to be very unkind to her, trying to make me go with them. Mom’s a fighter, though.”

“I believe it,” Reeve answered without thinking, his mind on the proud and unbending woman he had met in the Shinra building, “Aeris, I want to fix this.” 

“You can’t,” Barret answered before Aeris could, voice growling with contained anger, “You brought Shinra in.” 

Aeris frowned. Looked like she wanted to say something, then shook her head and turned to go back to her seat. 

Reeve didn’t sleep again. Sat in his living room and stared out at his view of the Shinra Building, lit up against the dark city. 

\---

Arriving at work in the morning Reeve was both relieved and vaguely baffled to find that the only consequences for walking away the previous day were a few missed emails and some very disapproving looks from his assistant. 

Those were consequences he could live with. 

His efforts to locate Denzel’s parents were less smooth. He ran up against a nightmare of paperwork and incomplete reports in HR where they were still trying to process the disaster – people out injured and needing temporary replacements, people confirmed on the casualty list needing permanent ones. Dozens and dozens of people who had simply stopped showing up, and with the phone lines cut through Sector 7 and most of the Sectors adjacent to it, it was impossible to know whether people were injured, missing, or...

“We’ll make a special note for you, Director,” the personnel manager promised him when he went to see him directly, “But right now we really can’t promise a time frame. A week or two maybe. Probably inside of a month.” 

Denzel’s family was simply _missing_. 

“Try the logs of the field hospitals if it’s urgent,” the man suggested as he was leaving, “Your people are managing that in tandem with medical, you should be able to get access that our people can’t.” 

“Thank you, I will,” he agreed, cursing the red tape. 

He did go from there to the sub-department of Urban Planning that was managing the relief effort, but had no better luck – succeeding only in frightening the temporary manager who dropped her phone and let out a little cry when she recognized him. 

“I’m not here to fire you,” he tried to joke as she fumbled the phone into its cradle, effectively hanging up on whoever had been on the other end. 

He hoped the call hadn’t been important. 

The meeting did not improve. 

\---

When he made it to the 42nd floor at the end of business, Reeve was surprised to see Rude still casually guarding the suite in which Marlene and Elmyra were being held. 

It was almost subtle, for someone who didn’t know better - possibly someone staying on the hospitality level from a political or corporate ally overseas. No one who knew the Turks would believe that the man thumbing casually through an auto parts magazine across the lobby was there to take a load off. 

When he spotted Reeve (when he allowed Reeve to become aware he had been spotted – there was no doubting that Rude had seen him first, kept up the charade just long enough for show) he got to his feet to intercept him before he could reach the door. 

“Have cause?” Rude asked him, and Reeve took a moment to parse his meaning. 

“Of course I have cause,” Reeve frowned back at him. The man’s frustrating conversational recalcitrance was certainly a power play, and Reeve was not in the mood. 

“Heidegger approve?” Rude pressed him, brows furrowing behind his dark glasses and crossing his arms. The pages of the magazine in his hand made a strange slithering noise as they were crushed. 

“I don’t give a damn if Heidegger approves,” Reeve answered him, “He wants a credible threat to keep AVALANCHE on board, he can’t have it without showing the value of compliance. I’m still the front of this project.” 

“Waiting for your Gold Saucer report,” Rude’s frown deepened, but he pressed his thumb to the discreet panel beside the door and waved Reeve to enter the suite. 

“Read Elena’s,” Reeve told him, shouldering past with a disregard that would have shocked himself not long before, “She was there.” 

“Send yours,” Rude growled after him, and any further conversation was cut off by the door sliding shut behind him. 

“Reeve!” 

He spun at his name to see Marlene racing toward him, and he looked around to spot Elmyra seated at a table by the kitchenette at the same time that the little girl barreled into his legs. 

The woman didn’t look happy to see him. 

He couldn’t really blame her. 

His brain caught up a second later when he looked down to see Marlene smiling up at him. 

“Elmyra said your name is Reeve. She said you’re on TV. Is that true?” 

_Oh hell._

He cleared his throat, “Yes, that’s true.” 

“Will my dad be on TV too?” 

Considering the most likely scenario for that to happen, Reeve certainly hoped not. 

“Maybe,” he answered, and tried to remember what people were supposed to say to small children. _How was school?_ clearly made no sense. _What did you do today?_ Had no answers he was prepared to deal with. 

“How are you?” he finally settled on, awkwardly patting to top of her head. 

“I’m good,” she answered succinctly, and continued to stare at him from where she had wrapped herself around his right leg. He looked to Elmyra for help, but her expression clearly stated that he was 1 - a son of a bitch; and 2 - on his own. 

The girl either took pity on him or got bored waiting for him to answer because she asked, “Did you see my dad today?” 

That was something he could work with. 

“I did,” he told her, relieved to be somewhat back on track, “In fact, that’s what I came to see you about.” 

He pulled from an inner pocked the mobile phone dedicated to the purpose – stashed away on impulse after the midnight call to the Gold Saucer and confirmed from his office earlier in the day still to work. He would need to find a better solution, negotiate with Scarlet and speak to the people in R&D about something more elegant – but it was enough for the time being. 

He activated the line, connected to the moogle’s speakers in another Costa del Sol hotel room, and handed the phone to Marlene. 

“He should be able to hear you now.” 

“Papa!” the girl released her hold on Reeve to grab the phone two handed, ran back to the table with Elmyra to show off her prize even as she began chattering into the line. 

Reeve relaxed and let his attention float to the cat. 

It was unsettling, hearing Marlene’s voice in person and then a second time after a brief lag emerging from the moogle’s tinny speakers. 

The weirdness didn’t seem to be a problem for Barret and Tifa, sitting across from Cait Sith in Costa del Sol – wall of furious silence broken, even if not for the sake of the robot, as they listened to Marlene recount the eventful day of a four-year-old in Shinra custody. 

It was with a new and uncomfortable twist in his gut that Reeve saw how Barret had made himself half sick with worry, features tired and drawn. His voice never wavered as he spoke to his daughter, though, and the little girl in Midgar carried on in easy ignorance of Barret’s distress. 

He took a seat across from Elmyra in spite of the glare she fixed on him when he approached, shrugging palms-out as he did.

“Aeris knows you’re here,” Reeve told her, “She sends her love, but isn’t prepared to talk.” 

Elmyra narrowed her eyes at him, then nodded thin-lipped, “That sounds like her. She’s more sensitive than people think, you know.” 

“I... think I know,” Reeve agreed, thinking of the night before, when she reached out then hesitated at the last moment. When she noticed things, _knew_ things that the others didn’t. 

In his periphery, Marlene continued chattering at her father about watching a movie with chocobos in it, and a tall bald man who brought her a colouring book. At the other end of Reeve’s attention Barret was smiling gently at the stream of rapid-fire information, occasionally interjecting with small, carefully crafted questions that verified the girl was safe and whole without letting her know he was doing it. 

The flutter was back behind Reeve’s ribs, and he staunchly ignored it. Focused his attention on Elmyra and told himself it was a case of giving Barret privacy to speak with his daughter. 

“I really am working to get you out of here,” he told her, “There are some... extenuating circumstances I need to address before I can make it happen, but the process is in motion.” 

Elmyra shook her head at him, “You might have won Marlene over. She’s a loving child,” here, she glanced over to where Marlene had taken the phone to crawl over and around the sofa with it while narrating the plot of the cartoons on the room’s television. She dropped her voice, “But you will not convince me that you aren’t as responsible for this as any of the Turks. You benefit just the same.” 

“I don’t-” 

“Don’t you?” She asked him, even as his displeasure at the accusation flared hot, “You still cash their cheques?”

Any response he might have made was cut off when the child’s monologue approached from behind him and a small hand patted at his arm. 

“A nice face,” she said, fingers hooking into his breast pocket and peering curiously at the fabric folded there, “and a beard like papa.” 

He stared at her for a confused moment, then cast his attention frantically to the room in Costa del Sol where Barret was clearly taking a special interest in the description his daughter was offering. 

A frantic impulse to the cat’s programming cut the line from the moogle’s side in time to block Marlene’s declaration of “Black hair, and Elmyra says he’s on TV.”

“ _Damnit Barret,_ ” the cat hissed in Costa del Sol, “You know I can’t let you have that kind of information.” 

“What the hell?” Barret soft expression turned to steel directly, attention leaving the newly silent moogle to glare up at the cat, “Get my daughter back on.” 

In Midgar, Marlene hadn’t yet noticed that the line had been cut off. She had also taken off with another of his pocket squares. He got up to follow her across the room.

“I’m sorry Marlene, I need to go now,” he told her, “I’ll have to take the phone, but I promise I’ll come back tomorrow.” 

He hoped he wasn’t lying to her. 

“What? No!” she grabbed the phone tighter and her lower lip trembled, and Reeve double checked that the line was closed at the far end – the last thing he needed was to have Marlene crying over the speakers again – as he tried to negotiate the return of the phone. 

“But I want my dad,” she told him, and sure enough tears were starting to swell in her eyes. 

“Tomorrow,” he promised, and decided that in fact he wasn’t lying. He’d go through an entire fleet of the Turks if he needed to, “And every day after until he gets here. I promise.” 

Elmyra finally stepped between them and took the phone gently but firmly from Marlene’s hands, passing it to Reeve. 

“Okay, big hero,” she told him coolly, “We’ll see you back here tomorrow.” 

He left the room feeling both resolved, and somehow even smaller than the cat on the other end of the link. 

\---

“Cat? Cat! _Reeve!_ ”

Barret was shouting by the time Reeve let his attention fully back to the cat, ensconced in the express elevator up to the executive floors where Rude’s appraising gaze could no longer track him. 

Felt the sense of being watched all the worse upon hearing his name where it clearly didn’t belong, in the hotel room with Barret and Tifa. 

“ _Don’t call me that,_ ” he shouted back through Cait Sith in a strange mechanical hiss of static and the nearest the robot’s voice would model distress. 

“Get my daughter back on the line,” Barret countered, grabbing the cat around the middle and lifting it from the top of the moogle to glare at him from close range. 

Reeve was quite certain it was entirely for show, in spite of the strange lurch as the robot’s feet kicked futilely in open space at the same time the elevator in Midgar glided to a halt on his office level. 

“I warned you I could only get a short call through,” Reeve protested, “And _hell_ , Barret, you can’t ask her for specific information and think I won’t shut that down. There are company secrets at issue.” 

“Company secrets like hostages and kidnapping, I know,” Barret growled back, and his grip on the cat tightened, just a little. 

Reeve stumbled slightly, then continued the brisk walk toward his office, “How many more times do you think I’ll be able to get calls through if there’s an information leak? Whatever you seem to think, I’m _not_ the only person involved in this situation. The Turks...” 

“The Turks?”

Reeve sighed, stopped in his tracks to give the situation in Costa del Sol his full attention, “I’m not one of them. Put me down.” 

Barret glared, then dropped Cait Sith back onto the moogle, causing Reeve to breathe a sigh of relief as the band of phantom pressure around his ribcage eased. 

“I’m trying to help,” Reeve announced, knowing as he said it how hollow it was under the circumstances. He looked back and forth between Barret and Tifa, the young woman staying back from the confrontation but watching with keen interest. It was midday in Costa del Sol. The room’s air conditioner buzzed steadily in the background.

“Sure thing, _Reeve_ ,” Barret answered him with distaste, then his expression turned speculative, “... Tuesti?” 

Reeve’s stomach dropped. He felt his skin prickle with sudden cold sweat, felt naked in a way that shouldn’t have been possible with an entire ocean between them. 

He swallowed hard, forced the Cait Sith to give its cheshire cat smile, “How would the Director of Urban Planning and Development have time to run a second project of this scope?” 

“Huh,” Barret shrugged, “Guess that’s true enough. Some other Reeve then.” 

Reeve let out a breath he hadn’t fully realized he was holding, flooded with some strange combination of relief and disappointment. He gave a small nod in tandem with the cat. 

“Alright then,” Barret continued, “‘Reeve with a beard and a nice face’... You’re still a Shinra bastard, but I suppose you could be worse.” 

Reeve wondered if he should thank him. 

“I’ll take that under advisement,” he said instead, and continued to his office.


	30. Chapter 30

Reeve had received an additional three emails from Shinra’s legal department before he was finally able to catch Cid in an isolated moment at a campsite one evening, during the Bronco’s southward trip along the coast. 

“You must know Shinra is taking legal action against you,” Cait Sith dropped into the sand beside where Cid had set up a tent and was staring out at the Tiny Bronco - moored just far enough from shore not to be stranded by low tide if they needed to leave in a hurry. 

“Figured it was only a matter of time,” Cid answered blandly. He’d distanced himself from the rest of the team and their campfire. His face was briefly lit by the flare of his cigarette before falling into darkness again. 

Normally, Reeve would have expected to see Vincent and Red XIII with the pilot at his post near to the plane, but the two had ventured out into the dunes for an evening patrol. 

They hadn’t asked Cait Sith to join them. 

Reeve wasn’t surprised. 

And tried not to be hurt. 

“They... want me to make you aware of a cease-and-desist order. The legal team is pursuing a non-competition agreement you entered into when they put you on retainer.” 

Cid barked a laugh, flicked some ash away into the sand, “Yeah, I suppose they could do that.” 

“They... well, you know by now they’ve frozen your accounts. You should know that your name still carries too much weight for them to try you for treason, but... it’s been suggested.” 

Cid took another drag of the cigarette and didn’t look over. 

Reeve frowned in Midgar. He’d pulled himself out of bed early and arranged the series of documents and emails regarding Cid’s case across half his living room. 

“In terms of your assets, there is an attempt underway to seize the house in Rocket Town as recompense for damages to Shinra property –”

“Shinra property,” Cid snorted and tossed the finished butt of his cigarette away in an arc of orange light against the dark beach. 

“Your girlfriend, Shera, is trying to delay proceedings but they’re planning to try you in absentia if you don’t present yourself in person soon.” 

“She’s not my – aww, fuck it.” 

Cid turned toward the cat, half his face visible in the light from the fire behind them. 

“Shera needs to take care of her own damn self instead of sticking her neck out for me all the time. Didn’t ask for it and don’t need it.”

“Cid, you’re going to lose _everything_ ,” Reeve tried to reason with him, wishing that he wasn’t forced to speak in the cat’s cheerful warble. 

“Not the things that matter,” Cid answered forcibly, turning away again to pull out another cigarette and lighting it in a smooth motion. He blew out a cloud of smoke into the pale moonlight and continued, “You don’t understand yet... Gonna, though, from the sounds of it.” 

Reeve began collecting the documents scattered across his home, and emailed the legal team asking them to wait, please, just a little bit longer. 

\---

Barret’s conversations with Marlene since the first one had been uneventful. Reeve had kept his word and found his way to the 42nd floor at least once a day as the team had loaded into the Bronco and began travelling toward the Temple of the Ancients, and Barret had in turn respected Reeve’s request to keep the calls superficial. Not to ask anything that would make it difficult for Reeve to keep the lines of communication open. 

Barret was still clearly simmering with fury most times that he had to deal with the cat, some deep hurt that Reeve hated playing a part in... but nothing had come to a head since the first day.

That was the day there had been discussion of going directly to Midgar on a rescue mission – finally curtailed by the logic that the first attack on the Shinra HQ had benefitted both from the element of surprise and from the disruption caused by Sephiroth’s concurrent attack... both of which elements would be absent during a second attempt. 

Their heading had come into question a second time soon after that, when whatever force was driving Cloud inspired him with an impulse to take a route that led directly over open ocean. The proposal had turned into a shouting match with Cid, who was adamant about being left to “pilot his own goddam plane.”

That altercation had finally resulted in Cloud curling in on himself and clutching unhappily at his head, bracketed again by a protective Barret and a worried Tifa. 

Reeve still wondered about that. Both about whatever strange force was compelling Cloud to move across the planet just in time to be wherever the trouble was starting, and about the growing closeness between him and Barret. 

Found himself wondering about the latter specifically, as he arrived home from the office one evening. Dropped his keys by the door. Slipped off his shoes. Loosened his tie. 

The call with Marlene had been light again that evening. The girl had slipped easily into a habit of expecting him after business hours. He thought she probably needed something else to occupy her time, and planned to contact some tutors who might be counted on for their discretion. He also thought she needed to find some entertainment that didn’t involve making off with his pocket squares. 

Reeve poured himself a scotch and sank into the sofa, sank into the cat. 

Another brilliantly bright day was filtering into the Tiny Bronco cabin in contrast to the perpetual Midgar smog. Yuffie had taken her post up front between Vincent and Cid, learning the controls and (at Cid’s vehement insistence) not being violently ill all over the upholstery. Aeris and Tifa had closed in on Red XIII in the cabin and were determinedly reworking the fine braids they had begun weaving into his mane back before Costa del Sol. 

Cloud and Barret... 

The men sat with their heads bent together over a map, tracking their progress southward toward the Temple of the Ancients. They moved easily through one another’s space to point out one thing or another on the paper spread in front of them. 

Cait Sith could have told them anything they wanted to know, of course. The robot’s AI and GPS could solve locational questions as easily as breathing if they had cared to ask. But they hadn’t. And they wouldn’t. 

The closeness between the two rankled for reasons Reeve couldn’t pin down. There was no sensible reason for him to have any stake in it at all. He certainly had no claim on friendship (or anything else) with either of them, under the circumstances. 

Any personal feelings he might have held in spite of that, well... whatever Barret’s relationship with Cloud was (and Elena had made it seem so much more intimate than simple friendship as she narrated their progress through the Gold Saucer), and whatever occasional moments that might have left Reeve wondering, didn’t make a damn bit of difference. 

Barret clearly hated him. And for good reason. 

Reeve swirled his glass and listened to the gently clink of the ice cubes, watched the amber liquor in the Midgar twilight that was such a contrast to the bright afternoon surrounding AVALANCHE. 

It was nothing new for him, he rationalized (peering through the neural link to where Barret sat relaxed and frustratingly handsome in the bright cabin of the Bronco), to develop some kind of crush on exactly the wrong person. 

Historically, it would have been a simple case of running up against an impenetrable wall of _straightness_. And the solution had always been the same - get some distance; throw himself into a hookup; wait for it to pass. 

Distance was hardly an option with Barret – even less over the past week as Reeve was drawn closer still during the evening meetings with Marlene, a terrible third wheel in their fleeting moments of connection. 

He wasn’t particularly interested in a diversionary hookup either. Too tired from juggling two lives in two places, too frustrated and furious with his inability to fix anything related to Shinra... it had been a discouragingly long time since he had been in the mood even for hooking up with himself. 

Really, he wouldn’t have minded if Barret were to just scratch the little cat’s ears again. 

And that wasn’t passing. 

Reeve got up and poured himself another scotch. 

\---

“Hey, Reeve, you there?” 

The cat’s sensors pulled him from sleep on a delay, dragged him up from where he had poured himself into bed after pouring himself a third glass of scotch, safe in the conviction that no one wanted anything to do with Cait Sith any more, anyway. 

Except that Barret apparently did. 

“I’m here,” he groaned aloud, pulling himself up against the headboard and rubbing his eyes dazedly. After a moment he wondered if the response had made it as far as the cat, and added, “Don’t call me Reeve.” 

“Yeah, fine,” Barret agreed, clearly not taking the instruction to heart. 

The clock by the bed told Reeve he had been asleep less than two hours. The stretch of beach where AVALANCHE had set up for the night was covered by the darkness of early starlight. 

Didn’t get stars like that, in Midgar. 

“What can I do for you?” Cait Sith asked. 

“Was wondering... how many people are there running the cat, anyway?” 

Reeve tried to process the question through the sleep fuzziness of his mind, then realized it was probably the lingering fuzziness of the scotch. 

“Just me,” he admitted, “Took a massive effort from R&D to develop it, but Cait Sith is made to be operated by one person.” 

“So it’s a weapon?”

“I...” Reeve hesitated. Wondered how much he cared about Shinra secrets anymore, really. It wasn’t as if he was handing out the blueprints, after all, and it was no longer any kind of secret who he worked for, “This model is designed for reconnaissance. The project as a whole has potential for future military applications.” 

“Shit... it’s not enough they already run the world?” Barret swore and shook his head, then continued before Reeve could protest, “So how many of these things are there now? How did you end up with one?”

“This is the only one I know about. The project is classified enough that I don’t know the full scope.” 

That in itself should probably have given him pause, but the ridiculousness of the situation - sitting as he was in his dark bedroom conversing with someone halfway across the planet through a cartoon cat that he controlled with his mind – coupled with the lingering looseness from the drinks and the effect of speaking with someone who knew _enough_ of what was going on to maybe, just maybe, understand the _rest_ \- kept him talking. 

“I was approached for the project based on my position in the company and my history in intelligence. It was worse than I ever though, you know, getting started. Took _months_ to get the damn thing working properly.” 

“… You regret it.” 

“Every day. But I also don’t... no, not like that,” the man and the cat spoke together, waved their arms in tandem to dismiss anger that threatened to overtake the curiosity in Barret’s face, wondered if the liquor was making him ramble, “Someone else would have done it instead, and I would have missed all of... _this_. I wasn’t lying, you know, when I said that I was impressed by the way you all do things. It’s so different from. Well.” 

Barret made a noise of acknowledgement, frowning. After a pause he asked, “So how do you run it? You’re just... always at some control center?” 

“No console,” Reeve shook his head with Cait Sith echoing the motion, “The connection is organic. Sort of organic. There are a series of control nodules implanted into my central nervous system that let me interact with the robot’s onboard AI in real time.” 

He paused at Barret’s horrified expression, and wondered if it was the reaction he should have had himself when he was approached about the project. He had still believed in Shinra’s good intentions, back then. It felt like a long time ago. 

“So you really are... here and there, at the same time?” 

Cait Sith nodded, then shrugged. 

“Any chance,” Barret paused, “Any chance of me doing the same? Stayin’ close to Marlene?” 

Reeve stared at him, “Ah, Barret... It’s Shinra technology. Even if you could get approved – and they didn’t just keep you in detention after you walked in the door – there’s no way that Shinra would allow the kind of security breach that would represent.”

Not to mention the surgeries and the months of recovery and training time and side effects. Reeve couldn’t imagine, anymore, why anyone would subject themselves to that while knowing better. 

But he supposed, glancing toward the gun graft chosen in the place of a straightforward prosthesis, that Barret might anyway, even if he did know.

Reeve shoved down the impulse to ask about the graft. As much as he wanted find out, it felt too invasive. And it was probably just the liquor wondering, anyway. 

“Guess you’re right,” Barret conceded, and chuckled, “Had to ask, didn’t I? So how does it work, anyway, controlling the cat?” 

“The AI does the basic things,” Reeve conceded, “Keeps it from falling over or tripping on itself. I send it instructions the about what to do, and its sensors send me feedback about the results.”

“Feedback, huh? Like what?” 

“Depends on the sensors,” Reeve let the little cat shrug, “Proximity, location, environmental conditions... things without analogous senses come though like hunches. Sight, sound and touch I can understand normally.”

When Barret didn’t answer right away, Reeve began to feel nervous. He watched the growing frown that took over Barret’s features, and understood his mistake at the same moment that Barret finally spoke.

“So every time we touched you... we’ve been touching _you_? And you didn’t _stop_ us? Damn, man, we slept together.” 

Yes, in fact, they had... although not as suggestively as Barret’s tone made it seem. Maybe it was just as bad though, all things considered. His own intense initial distress when he had realized the accuracy of the sensors’ projection onto him was evidence enough, all that time ago when he had first joined AVALANCHE, it wasn’t hard to understand the suspicious and freshly furious expression that Barret was aiming at him as a result. 

All the discomfort he’d experienced from the connection came back in a sudden rush of shame.

“How could I have told you?” Reeve asked by way of explanation, although it seemed like a hollow excuse when he said it out loud. 

It certainly had no impact on Barret’s reaction, as the man continued on, “You let the girls carry you around the way they did all that time? You let _Yuffie_ carry you around like that? For fuck sake Reeve, she’s a teenager! What kind of pervert does that?” 

“But I’m-” _gay_ , he cut himself off before he could finish. It was clearly the wrong answer to the accusation, thinking of his own self-recrimination back before time and exposure had made contact with the cat feel something akin to normal. And it certainly wouldn’t improve Barret’s disposition toward him once the man inventoried his own past interactions with Cait Sith. In Midgar Reeve scrubbed his hands over his face to try to hold in a wave of hysterical laughter, one that mercifully emerged only as a bout of hiccupping static from the cat, “I’m _sorry_.” 

“Not nearly enough,” Barret shook his head, turning to stalk back to where the rest of AVALANCHE was clustered around a campfire, staring at them since the shouting had started. 

“Barret, _please_ ,” Reeve tried to call after him, but the man just made a dismissive gesture over his shoulder. 

“Can’t deal with this shit right now,” Barret growled quietly. Cait Sith’s sensitive microphones barely picked it up, before being left alone again outside the circle of firelight. 

He wondered if it was the liquor, making it feel as if another new set of walls was building up between him and the rest of the group.

He let the cat curl against the moogle’s furry head in the darkness, and watched the stars that he couldn’t see through the Midgar smog. 

\---

In his email the next morning, there was a message from medical apologizing that Professor Hojo had been forced to cancel their appointment the previous week and a request to reschedule. There was also a notification of his paycheque, with a note from accounting gently prompting him to submit his expenses from Costa del Sol. 

He filed both messages unanswered and tried to forget them.


	31. Chapter 31

A reassuringly uneventful stretch of days ended abruptly when Reeve was yanked from sleep by the sound of screaming. 

His mind dropped into the cat in time to see the entire of AVALANCHE running from their tents and grabbing weapons to the ready.

The state of alert agitation was diffused when the screams were revealed to be Yuffie’s discovery of an alarmingly large spider in her tent. 

Sheepish in the middle of the adrenaline-fueled, sleep-addled crowd, Yuffie still steadfastly refused to go back to sleep until someone had resolved the situation. Eventually, Aeris crawled into the tent and shooed the offending animal out the back flap, looking at it sternly until it scurried back into the jungle. 

“I hate _bugs_!” Yuffie complained, shivering, but received less sympathy than she clearly had anticipated as the remainder of sleepers went grumbling back into their own tents. With coaxing she was convinced to as well, although she insisted that Red XIII stay with her in the event that the spider returned. 

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it,” the Cosmo Beast appealed to Vincent where he stood watch, but slunk into the tent after her when she persisted, the last few inches of his tail trailing safely outside the little shelter. 

AVALANCHE’s journey south east toward the Temple of the Ancients had brought them at length to the same landmass as their destination – and in the process brought them back into Midgar’s time zone. Reeve had expected that the change would allow him to manage his days more efficiently, get better perspective after getting regular sleep. 

But he hadn’t slept well since the night he had argued drunkenly with Barret – an event so surreal that he would have thought he had imagined if not for the way he was still feeling the repercussions in his interactions with the rest of the group. 

He didn’t sleep again at their new campsite, either - just stared through the cat out into the jungle that had refused to respect the implicit borders of their camp, the heavy tropical atmosphere newly oppressive and menacing. 

It had been a big spider.

\---

His lack of sleep made the executive meeting the next morning interminable. 

Rufus himself had made it to the meeting though, although he looked unhappy about the whole thing. 

“Someone explain to me again how this Temple of the Ancients relates to the Neo-Midgar Project?” Rufus asked, clearly already fed up after being brought up to speed on the Sector 7 relief effort, further failed campaigns to retrieve Huge Materia from Fort Condor, and a frankly excruciating presentation by accounting. 

Reeve could hardly blame the guy for not wanting to be in Midgar, following the violent murder of his father barely a couple of months prior in the same building where they were currently conducting the meeting. The situation would have been bad enough even before considering how the young man had spent the previous several years establishing himself in Junon, only to be called away and expected to take the reins of the massive Shinra multinational from his deceased father in the middle of a major crisis and without even a transition period. 

Although Reeve knew would still need to approach the new president regarding the hostages held on the 42nd floor (surely one of Heidegger’s less savory initiatives, taking advantage of Rufus’s inexperience) he recognized that it would need to be brought up more delicately that in the middle of a meeting with all the executives and half of the Turks. 

“While at first we believed that the temple might be related to the location of the Promised Land,” Reeve began to answer the young President’s question, on reassuringly solid ground in matters of city development, “Geological surveys have since showed little to no abnormally high value for Mako extraction sites. In the intervening time however-”

“We’ve uncovered salient information in the archives regarding a connection to the Black Materia,” Scarlet cut him off, “likewise, initial reports place Sephiroth clones at the site.” 

“Yes, fine,” Rufus answered her, “The Turks are in place and holding, I’ve been in direct contact with Tseng.” 

He ignored a disgruntled noise from Heidegger. 

Reeve ignored it also, protesting, “AVALANCHE is less than a day out from the Temple now, why wasn’t I informed of this?” 

“You’re being informed now,” Rufus waved him off, forcing Reeve to hold back a retort, “They have instructions that AVALANCHE is to approach ahead of them to evaluate the situation... you will of course coordinate with Heidegger on this?” 

Reeve shot a look across the table to where the Director of Public Security was looking back with an equally stunned expression. 

Deciding Heidegger’s surprise was a curiosity to be addressed later, Reeve let himself drop away into the cat. 

In the southern jungles, AVALANCHE was still packing up their camp for the day, a poor night sleep that had begun with strange noises in the dark and mosquitoes in the tents having come to a full halt at the appearance of the spider (which Yuffie’s retelling had inflated to the size of a small dog). 

In the periphery of his attention, there was some kind of upset between Tifa and Aeris as they packed up their tent.

He ignored it to announce at the full volume available through his little avatar “Shinra knows you’re on your way!” 

Several faced snapped around to stare at the cat. 

Since the argument with Barret, Reeve had left the cat largely silent at the periphery of the group aside from the nightly phone calls with Marlene, and no one had made any effort to engage with Cait Sith over the same time. He wondered distantly if he wouldn’t have incurred the same shock regardless of what he had shouted. 

“The Turks are already there and planning to let you take point,” he added at a more normal volume. 

“The hell?” Barret answered him first, surprise manifesting directly as anger, “When were you going to tell us?” 

Reeve made an effort not to show a response, acutely aware that he was, in fact, still in an executive meeting at the other end of the connection, “I’m just finding out now, in the board room. Apparently they’ve identified a number of Sephiroth clones at the site and are waiting for you all to go in first.” 

Barret looked about to shout again but Cloud held up a hand, “Why are you telling us this?” 

Reeve shook the little cat’s head, resisting a new wave of frustration at the distance between the team and his little avatar, “Because I don’t think you deserve to get killed walking in blind. I’m under the impression that you intend to go regardless of the circumstances?”

Cloud frowned and looked down with crossed arms, which Reeve took to mean ‘yes’. 

“What are they expecting us to find?” Vincent broke in, “Sephiroth...?”

“Realistically I think they’re expecting you to find trouble,” Reeve shrugged through the robot, “There’s some talk about Black Materia but the whole thing is fairly nebulous at this point.” 

“The Promised Land?” 

Cait Sith shook his head again, “Geological surveys came back without any special levels of Lifestream flow. It’s just a temple, except-”

“Sephiroth,” Cloud finished.

“Exactly,” Reeve agreed.

“And Turks.” 

“Unfortunately,” Reeve suppressed a sigh, with an effort of will trying to track the ongoing conversation in the board room and with AVALANCHE at the same time. 

“Do we know how many Turks?” Barret asked, anger gone and all business again. 

“At least one,” Cait Sith reported. 

“There will be at least two,” Vincent supplemented, “I don’t think that will have changed since I served with them.” 

“And clones?” Cloud prompted.

“Unspecified,” Cait Sith answered. 

Cloud sighed, “Okay, we’ll-”

“ _I don’t give a damn!_ ” Aeris interrupted all of them by shouting.

Reeve did jump then, making a motion of apology to the collected executives at the table, and offering Heidegger’s suspicious expression an apologetic smile. 

“Aeris...” in the jungle, Tifa had grabbed the woman around the middle and was slowly lowering them both onto their knees, Aeris clearly having abandoned any intention of staying on her feet autonomously. 

“What’s going on?” Cloud asked, already halfway to them, but Tifa was already shaking her head as Aeris struggled against her grasp. 

“I don’t know,” Tifa answered, “she just started talking, then she started shouting-”

“I can’t _do_ this!” Aeris shouted at both of them, as if in illustration. 

“Do what?” Cloud asked as the rest of the group began to form a circle around the scene. 

Aeris looked up at him, then at Tifa. She seemed to be taking in the presence of the people around her as if from a great distance. 

All at once she slumped defeated into Tifa’s arms, “Any of it. It’s too big. It’s too _much_. What they’re asking...”

“What _who’s_ asking?” Tifa asked, voice soft but eyes bright with panic as she looked up at Cloud. 

“Can’t you hear them?” Aeris implored her, but Tifa shook her head helplessly, “It’s so loud. But I can’t do it, I’m all alone...” 

“But we’re all here,” Cloud reasoned, looking nervously around the group. 

They all seemed equally unnerved, to Reeve’s perception. He thought of Aeris’s strange sensitivity in Cosmo Canyon, when the planet had cried out and overwhelmed her. Directing Cait Sith’s attention to Red XIII he saw that the Cosmo Beast was already staring at the little cat, offering one of his uncanny nods in acknowledgement of the shared thought. 

Aeris again started trying to get loose of Tifa’s arms even as the other girl unthinkingly curled more protectively around her. 

“It’s just me, don’t you understand?” Aeris asked them, looking around the circle, “I’m just me and it’s too _big_. If my mother was here...” 

She heaved a single deep breath all at once, hitching as she tried to let it out, confessed “I wish she was here,” and began to cry. 

Tifa sent a meaningful look around the assembled group and purposefully tucked Aeris’s head beneath her chin while the young woman shook and wept.

A division appeared as the circle broke apart into people shuffling awkwardly away or hovering helplessly by as Tifa failed to calm Aeris’s vacillating extremes of emotion. Reeve was just able to make out a wrenching plea of “ _I want my mom,_ ” and felt without asking that she wasn't talking about Elmyra. 

There wasn’t a damn thing he could do about that. 

But he could do _something_ , at least.

In Midgar, Reeve cleared his throat and made meaningful eye contact with Heidegger, gestured to his head briefly and barely waited for the man to nod acknowledgement before excusing himself from the room. 

Free of the board room he ran for the elevator bank with the tropical jungle still vivid in his mind’s eye, shifted from foot to foot impatiently as he waited for an elevator first to arrive and then to deliver him down to the 42nd floor. 

Marlene’s face lit up when he entered the suite hours earlier than he normally would, but after running halfway across the room to greet him must have read the expression on his face because she, too, began to cry. 

“ _Please_ ,” Reeve asked Elmyra, shoving the phone into her hands before she could fully ask what he was doing there and before the line had even finished connecting.

She scowled at him for a moment, then accepted the phone with a nod. 

In the south near the Temple of the Ancients, Cait Sith slunk into the trees and tried not to be an invasive presence while Elmyra told Aeris that didn’t need to do _anything_ she didn’t want to, that she could _just come home, please just come home._

\---

In Midgar, Reeve had made his way back up to the board room after the call between Aeris and Elmyra had reached its conclusion – Elmyra frustrated and Aeris calmer and filled with some new conviction. 

From the board room, Reeve found himself following into an operations room with Heidegger and those Turks remaining in Midgar, ready to coordinate with the team in the south. 

As the Temple of the Ancients finally rose into view past the close foliage of the jungle, Reeve guided Cait Sith and its moogle guiltily nearer to Barret.

“I won’t be able to get a line through to Marlene tonight,” he admitted. 

Barret raised an eyebrow at him, then gave a half shrug, “Didn’t really expect you to, considerin'... Tomorrow?” 

The little cat nodded agreement. 

Barret reached out automatically to ruffle the cat’s fur, then caught himself before he made contact. He frowned and picked up his pace, leaving Cait Sith alone.


	32. Chapter 32

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for symptoms of head injury (go directly to next chapter to skip)

It was the only reasonable course of action, to send the little robot in the place of a living person into the temple. It might even have been fun too, spinning away at the puzzle like a child’s toy that bent inward on itself recursively. 

But Tseng was dead, or would be soon from the look of him. 

And then the pressure of the collapsing temple, the pressure of the collapsing cat. 

Reeve thought it would feel good, being the hero to save the day. 

It hurt like hell. 

Rude caught him as his knees buckled in the backlash. Loosened his tie for him even as Reno was toeing a bin toward him, sensing before Reeve himself did that he was about to violently empty the contents of his stomach. 

“What the hell is happening right now?” Heidegger demanded of the Turks - must have been asking the Turks, because Reeve wasn’t going to - _couldn't_ \- answer him, consciousness peeling away from him along with his awareness of the cat. 

\---

“We’re switching on the mk V, can you take control now?”

“Huh?” Reeve was vaguely aware of a darkened room, had some idea that it might be part of a medical facility, maybe even one that was familiar to him, if he could just _think_ for a moment. 

“I need to know, can you control it?”

_Control the cat._ Yes, he could do that. He was _good_ at that, he had worked hard to learn that, worked double hard to accelerate the process when it had been deployed ahead of schedule. He knew how to control the cat. 

“I can,” he answered, his own voice reaching him from far away. He thought one of the figures crowded around him might have been Heidegger. 

Then everything was black again, and he didn’t think much of anything. 

\--- 

“Cait!”

Someone was shouting, in bright green daylight and oppressive tropical heat. 

The Moogle lurched under him. 

The sunlight was too bright. 

He clung to the fluffy white fur under him but his fingers didn’t listen and he was twisting and falling, falling as his world spun and the cat’s sensors screamed like a raw nerve, like something that should have been familiar but absolutely wasn’t. 

He cried out with the robot’s impact on the ground, then pulled away hard and back into himself, ignoring the shouts that followed him back.

\---

“This model is identical to the previous one,” Hojo explained to him later that night, an old analogue clock ticking away in the corner of the room and telling him it was just before midnight, “You’ve already developed all the neural pathways necessary to accept and interpret the link information, but the adaptive algorithm of the AI reset to its last backup point and you’ll have to retrain it.” 

It should have been reassuring, having the division head’s personal attention in medical, but Reeve felt a thread of cold fear that he couldn’t find an origin for. There was something about Hojo that he needed to remember, if he could just get himself to _focus_. 

The man pulled a pocket light from his lab coat and flashed the glaring brightness toward Reeve’s eyes one by one as he cringed back into the unyielding surface of the medical bed. 

“Your pupils are reacting normally. Still, we’ll send you for an MRI to confirm everything is normal. Your friend Heidegger will have fits if his precious project falls through.” 

Reeve wanted to protest that he was worried about a lot more than Heidegger’s project, but he was already falling asleep again. 

\---

In his dreams - at least he thought they were dreams - Reeve saw the clones that he had heard about in the boardroom, stumbling and lurching through the southern jungle oblivious to the heat, to the bugs, to the presence of AVALANCHE walking among them as they travelled north. 

His fears about the clones - a dark suspicion creeping around the back of his mind - were realized when they were revealed to be the same pitiful creatures first encountered shuffling helplessly around Nibelheim. The “volunteers” in yet another classified project. 

“We need to go north,” Red XIII’s strange, growling voice echoed in his mind, “Aeris’s scent goes _north_.”

And so did the clones. 

\---

He woke in soothing darkness, back in the medical facilities of the Shinra building. The walls were green - not the vibrant, threatening wildness of the jungles, but something soothing, no doubt selected to put people at ease during trying times. 

He tried to sit up and heard an electronic beeping, turned to see an array of monitoring devices occupying the room with him, and a mess of wires connecting him to them and them to each other. 

He sighed and laid back down. 

There was something, some fragment of a dream about clones and Aeris and AVALANCHE that he needed to remember, but it was already disappearing behind the wall of fog that gathered each time he tried to focus his thoughts. 

He went back to sleep, instead. 

\---

When he woke again he was the cat, and he wasn’t alone. 

“Awake?” 

Reeve tried to focus on the feed from Cait Sith’s cameras, but the world swam in and out of focus, making his empty stomach clench with nausea but thankfully not rebel. 

Someone who must have been Barret, judging from his frame, pulled a chair up in front of Cait Sith in the darkened room. 

“Are you still... you?” he asked, leaning toward the cat. 

Reeve pondered the question through the fuzziness creeping between his thoughts, between him and the cat. He decided it probably wasn’t worth any existential examination. 

“It’s a new robot,” he answered, and the cat _did_ answer in the same chipper voice as always, not reflecting any of the strain of its controller or the way that his head throbbed in protest when he tried to form the intent to have it speak, “It’s still me controlling it.” 

No, the cat’s voice wasn’t exactly the same as always. It warbled and slurred at the edges, lacked the bubbly tones it had projected previously. 

“Good. What happened?”

“Happened?” Reeve echoed, and his head swam as he tried to form the automatic response only to find it required an unexpected effort. 

“Inside the Temple. And whatever happened that made you like this.” 

“Like this,” Reeve echoed again, and realized that he was speaking out loud in the medical ward as well as through the cat. He lifted his head to look around but saw no one in the room to notice. 

“There was a puzzle in the temple. Hojo thinks that it’s,” Reeve began, then stopped. What did Hojo think? Was it about the Temple? “I don’t remember. I don’t remember _anything_.”

“Hojo,” Barret repeated, although he no longer seemed to be addressing Cait Sith. 

“Hojo,” Tifa’s voice answered Barret’s with distaste, and Reeve found that he could, with effort, focus on her where she sat some meters away. 

“We thought about leaving you,” Barret admitted, turning back to the cat with a frown, “You helped us, thought, when you didn’t have to. And you’re still my only connection to my little girl.” 

“Barret...” 

“Doesn’t mean I like you,” the man got up and walked away. Reeve was vaguely aware of Tifa calling after him, as a door he hadn’t noticed opened and closed in the cat’s periphery. 

He forced his slippery mind to focus on the surroundings, and wondered how they had ended up there - some run down, dark space with walls of raw wood and furniture covered in worn blankets. Nets and aging equipment made him think that the building might be a part of the fishing outpost where they had left the Tiny Bronco before venturing into the jungle. 

Across the room, Cloud was laying limp on a battered sofa. 

Cait Sith was in his own pile of bedding, placed across an old workbench. 

“What’s going on?” Tifa asked him, leaving her post next to Cloud and moving to take the chair that Barret had vacated. 

Reeve didn’t know what to tell her that she didn’t already know about losing the first robot and activating the second, except that it _hurt_ and he was _confused_. 

He didn’t think any of AVALANCHE cared about either of those things. 

“I don’t know,” he answered honestly, “I don’t know anything that’s happened since before.” 

Tifa’s face, already unhappy, pinched tighter, “Then you haven’t heard where Aeris went?”

“What?” 

“She left,” Tifa explained, “While we were taking care of Cloud, she just disappeared. We followed her this far, but then she got on a boat...” 

Reeve ached at the distress on the young woman’s face, and decided he wasn’t the only one suffering. He wished he had an answer for her. 

“I’m... I’m in medical,” he admitted, “I don’t know anything that’s happening.” 

“I suppose not,” she sighed, “Cid’s got your moogle on the Bronco already. He’s really good with it. Said he didn’t know what to do with you, though. As soon as the plane is supplied we’re going to-”

Reeve didn’t find out what they were going to do, he was already asleep. 

\---

He couldn’t ignore the lurching seasickness of the Bronco as the cat’s sensors delivered everything too intense and too raw. 

He pulled himself upright in the small room in Shinra medical and began pulling free from the assorted tubes and sensors as they beeped in protest, convinced he was going to vomit and not wanting to do it where he was. 

The cat’s sensors screamed for attention, the AI alerting him to every cresting wave as a new threat. 

“You okay, Cait?” he heard Yuffie asking him distantly, even the teenager less perturbed by the rough water than the new robot. 

He couldn’t answer her, just stumbled through the Shinra building with some vague sense that he needed to get to his office. 

Somewhere along his path, Rude manifested beside him and threw a jacket over his shoulders, waving off the medical staff as they tried to intervene. 

“Sounded alarms,” the man explained, but didn’t halt his progress down the few stories to his office and waited patiently while Reeve pulled on his spare suit once there. 

He desperately wanted a shower, but settled for brushing his teeth and splashing some water on his face in the office’s bathroom and felt something nearer to normal when he emerged - in spite of the chaotic progress of the Bronco in the back of his mind. 

“Tseng was injured,” Reeve asked when he emerged from the bathroom to find Rude still waiting, “Is he...”

“Junon,” the man answered, stony faced, “Critical condition.” 

“I’m sorry,” Reeve answered, and meant it. He wasn’t comfortable with the Turks by any stretch, but had always considered Tseng to lack many of the major personality deficits displayed by his colleagues. 

Rude grunted in acknowledgement and pressed a bottle of water into his hands, ordering him to, “Sip.”

Reeve did. Then, he fell asleep on his office sofa. 

\---

He surfaced into the cat in a flurry of activity in the cabin of the Bronco, where Cloud had begun casting fire magic without waking from the fugue state he had fallen into.

He watched the rest of AVALANCHE wrestling the unconscious man’s materia from him in a panic while Cid shouted abuse from the cockpit. 

It was a strange dream, and he let it drift away like so much else had just drifted away. 

\---

When Reeve woke again, the office lit by the dim grey light of morning in Midgar, he felt like he’d been run over by something large and vindictive. 

His head pounded unrelentingly, coupled with a queer feeling of something in his mind pulled too tight and stretched too thin. 

When he staggered over to his desk, there was no note, but a bottle of prescription painkillers and a phone that looked almost like the one that connected the hostages to Cait Sith’s moogle. 

Right. The moogle was gone, and so was the phone. This was a new one, there to keep the line of connection open - keeping the threat present and credible, as far as Shinra was concerned. 

There was also a manila folder stuffed with documents about the updated mission, but when Reeve tried to read through them the words had begun swimming on the page by the time he reached the end of the first paragraph. 

He took the phone down to the 42nd floor and let Marlene speak to her father, sitting down on the sofa in the suite where the girl was captive and falling into a doze as soon as he was sure that the call was connected. 

He was awakened by Rude, who frowned at him from behind dark glasses and told him that it was time to leave. 

Elmyra placed the phone back in his hands, looking strained. 

He wondered if it was about Aeris. 

Marlene didn’t take his pocket square. He had forgotten to wear one. 

He was forgetting a lot of things, he suspected. But he was too tired to care. 

Back in his office he dry swallowed a few of the painkillers from the bottle on his desk and laid down on the sofa. 

He was too tired to drive home.


	33. Chapter 33

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still in the realm of head injuries this chapter, please be warned to jump ahead to the next chapter if you're sensitive to that <3

The next time that Reeve surfaced into a moment of lucidity he was in a room he didn’t recognize, although the scene was familiar. 

Cloud, still unconscious, spread out on a cot. Barret and Tifa hovering and looking worried. There was someone else there, a young teenager from the look of her, but he couldn’t get the cat to focus for more than that. 

Cait Sith must have made some noise, because the two AVALANCHE members in the room turned to him at the same time. 

“Cait? You back with us?” Tifa asked. She moved to sit beside where the robot had again been placed in a nest of blankets on a table, reaching out to pet the little cat’s ears in a way that would have been comforting, but for the way that it set the AI’s sensors screaming with unexpected proximity. 

Before Reeve could coordinate a reaction, Barret was already growling.

“Damnit, Tifa, don’t touch him, he’s-”

Tifa flinched back from the robot, “I know, but…” she sighed and shook her head, “I’m sorry, Reeve, it’s easy to forget that you aren’t actually. Well, _Cait_ , I guess.” 

“It’s okay,” Reeve answered simply, concentrating to speak through the unfamiliar pathways to his avatar. _Don’t call me Reeve,_ was too much effort. So was explaining that of course she wanted to reach out - that had always been the reaction the little cat was been designed to evoke. Or telling her that he was grateful for the gesture, even when it was setting his nerves on fire, because it meant that _maybe_ he wasn’t cut off from AVALANCHE entirely - not yet at least. 

“Where are we?” he asked instead, with conscious effort. 

Barret and Tifa shared a look before turning back to him. 

“You always used to know that kind of thing,” Barret shook his head, “We’re in Junon. Waiting for Spike to wake up - if he’s gonna.” 

“What’s going on?” Reeve turned the sensors temporarily to Cloud. The young man was pale, and didn’t look like he was waking up any time soon. 

Tifa began to answer, but Barret placed a hand on her shoulder and shook his head when she looked at him. She pursed her lips before getting up to rejoin the teenager where she sat near Cloud. The girl seemed vaguely irritated that Tifa was returning, and Reeve thought he might have found the entire thing endearing under less strained circumstances. 

With Tifa back across the room, Barret took a seat at the table and regarded the robot thoughtfully. 

Reeve wondered if it was the odd perspective or the jarring new pathways being forged by the neural link that made him feel so small inside the cat. 

“Marlene thought you looked pretty raw when you went to see her. But that was a couple’a days ago.” 

“A couple of days?” Reeve asked. It couldn’t possibly have been that long - he’d only just seen her, albeit briefly. 

Barret frowned at him, “What’s going on with you really, cat? Tifa says you were in medical and Elmyra said you look like shit. She also said...”

He trailed off with a scowl, regarding the little robot over crossed arms as if trying to decide how to proceed. 

_Elmyra,_ something about the thought was important, not just because Aeris was missing. 

The thought passed out of his mind when Barret prompted him, “Hey, you still with us?” 

Reeve forced the robot to focus its sensors on the man in front of him, “I am.” 

“And...?”

“The link isn’t syncing properly,” Reeve answered, then wondered if that was actually the problem. He searched his memory and found it lacking, “When the other robot was destroyed… what day is it?” 

Instead of answering, Barret shared another tense look with Tifa where she sat in front of the pale, unconscious former SOLDIER. 

Looking back to the cat, Barret held up his index finger, “Can you track this?” 

Reeve worked to focus on the digit, but when Barret began moving his hand from side to side the world swam again and he reflexively pulled away from the cat - only the man’s frustrated curses following him back to Midgar. 

\--- 

He was at home when he surfaced, and surprised to find himself there rather than in his office. With effort he cast back for the thread of memory and found some vague recollection that -

_\- when he slept through an entire day of meetings in Midgar after visiting Marlene, Rude had appeared in the office asking him, “Medical?”_

_“_ No! _” Reeve answered, so suddenly and emphatically that his head pounded from it, “Home. Please, just home.”_

_Rude had frowned, but after disappearing into the office antechamber for a muffled conversation had reappeared and dragged Reeve to his feet and down to the parking garage through the subdued after-hours of the Shinra building._

_Reeve never gave Rude his address, or his keys, but nevertheless was soon being deposited onto his own bed in his own home. There was something worrying and somewhat threatening about those implications... but of course, the Turks went where they wanted and no simple building security was going to stop them._

_“Never took you for a nursemaid,” Reeve observed blurrily when the man placed more painkillers and a bottle of water at the bedside, and Rude frowned at him._

_“Classified,” he answered._

_Reeve wondered if it was his own condition that was classified, or the way that Rude was hovering worriedly in his periphery, and fought the absurd urge to laugh only by virtue of his own exhaustion._

_“On leave until Monday,” Rude told him, “Hojo says tests are normal. Sleep it off.”_

_It was a veritable speech from the stoic Turk, and Reeve was preparing to comment on it but, perhaps for the best, fell asleep instead as a cure spell washed over him._

\---

It was evening before he next considered slipping down the newly-strange pathways into the cat, after waking with a fuzzy mouth and a fuzzy mind and shuffling out from the bedroom to stare through picture windows toward the Shinra building. 

Something half forgotten nagged at him about Elmyra, and the way Barret had fallen silent after mentioning her. It loomed at the back of his mind but slipped away every time he tried to look directly at it. 

He thought it might be that he needed to visit his mother - but the dark bruising around his eyes when he’d passed a mirror earlier told him that he couldn’t without giving too much away. He’d have his assistant send flowers instead. She always liked that. 

If that summoned another image, one of Heidegger passing him a piece of paper warning him that she was in danger, it was almost certainly a product of another strange dream manufactured by the recalibrating neural link. 

Unable to pin down any more productive thoughts in that vein, he focused his attention on finding his way to Cait Sith. 

When his consciousness settled into the room in Junon, there was a television on in the corner playing news with the sound off and his slippery memory produced a child’s voice as clearly as if she was in the room, saying _“Elmyra says he’s on TV...”_

Oh hell. 

With a sick feeling he scanned the room for the rest of AVALANCHE, and saw Barret and Tifa still sitting with the unknown teenager, crowded silent and miserable around Cloud. 

He wanted to shout at them, _how much did she tell you?_ But of course, there was no useful answer to that question - either way it was too late. 

And if the speculative looks that Barret had been fixing on the little robot were any indication, meaning glaringly obvious in retrospect, he didn’t actually need to ask.

“You’re back,” Barret rumbled, and Tifa glanced first at him, then over to Cait Sith. Something in her features, at least, eased a little when she looked at him, and Reeve took it as a good sign. 

“Everyone’s still out looking for information about Aeris,” she told him, glanced at the teenager before clearly deciding that whatever she was about to ask wasn’t more sensitive than the girl could hear, “I don’t suppose that you’ve heard anything through Shinra?”

“I’m sorry,” Reeve answered, and he was. 

Barret growled and got to his feet, “Why would you believe him anyway, you know he’s-”

“ _Sick,_ ” Tifa interrupted him and Barret glared at her before turning on Cait Sith. 

“Get better _fast_. Got a whole _lotta_ bones to pick with you,” Barret snarled at him while storming toward the door. 

“He’s not going to forgive me, is he?” Reeve asked Tifa when the man was gone. 

“He’s worried about Aeris and Cloud,” Tifa answered, tight lipped, and Reeve wondered if she was actually going to cry, and what he could possibly do about that, “You hurt him, you know. He really did like you, before.” 

Her words rang with the special sincerity available to young women, too direct and too earnest in spite of her own distress. Left him feeling uncomfortable and exposed. He looked away toward the door with a sinking heart. 

“I’m sorry,” Reeve said. It felt like the only thing he’d said since the Gold Saucer. 

Tifa sighed, “I wish Aeris was here. It’s her who’s good at these things.” 

“Tifa, I’m so-”

“-sorry,” he said to his sitting room in Midgar.

The kettle was screaming from the kitchen where he had forgotten he was making tea. 

He went to turn it off. 

\---

Reeve was awakened the next morning when his phone rang, and he spent a disorienting few moments flipping back and forth between the man and the cat while trying to locate the source of the noise. 

It was Palmer, out of the hospital and back in the office, back to worrying about the Tiny Bronco. 

Feeling less charitable than he might have been if not just shocked from sleep, Reeve wondered why the hell Palmer was on the inside of a project requiring such high classification to begin with. 

Instead of voicing his opinion Reeve told the man that he was on leave and to deal with Heidegger before proceeding to hang up. 

When his mind then found its way to Junon, the tone seemed lighter than it had been the previous evening. Barret and Tifa were newly joined by Yuffie, speaking in voices that were quiet but excited. 

Reeve forced the cat to get to its feet, wobbling slightly but staying upright. 

“Cait! You’re up!” Yuffie noticed him first. 

“Did something happen?” he asked, willing his avatar to form the words and finding it came easier than it had in the days before. 

Barret waved a hand at the girls to stay quiet but Tifa shook her head, “Might as well tell him. He helped us, before.” 

When he frowned at her she flapped her hands at him in a universal _‘go on’_ gesture. 

He answered with an unhappy noise but turned to address the cat, “... Know you didn’t need to tell us half of what you did, before the temple... thanks, for that.”

Reeve stared at him, and tried desperately to remember exactly what he _had_ said before they had approached the Temple of the Ancients. It was a blur, the morning in the boardroom lost in the same fog as everything else that had happened in the past weeks. He hoped it hadn’t been anything too incriminating. It was too late to do anything about it, anyway. 

“I... thank you, Barret.” 

The man let out a growling sigh before answering, “Don’t get any ideas that this is over. Got a lot to make up for, Tuesti.”

“... I know.”

After fixing Cait Sith with an uncomfortably long look, Barret sighed, “Cid found some old buddies down at the port. They think Aeris got on a cargo ship headed north. Not sure where she got off because it hasn’t circled back yet, but it’s something.” 

“Have you heard anything from Shinra?” Tifa added when Barret finished, “Is there any news at all?” 

Reeve wished he had something to offer in the face of her anxious expression but could only shake his head, “I haven’t heard anything.”

Any further questioning was pushed back when the door rattled a few stilted times before finally swinging inward to admit Red XIII. Reeve thought he looked tired - if it was possible for the creature to be attributed with human expression - though he seemed in good humour. 

“Cid tells me the Bronco is nearly ready to go,” he reported, “If Cloud and Cait Sith can be moved, we can depart before noon.”


	34. Chapter 34

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No particular warnings for this chapter. In brief summary of the previous two chapters for those who skipped: Reeve is suffering from fuzzy memories and lost time on either side of the destruction of the first Cait Sith, Cloud remains unconscious following the encounter with Sephiroth at the Temple of the Ancients, AVALANCHE has followed news of Aeris north to Junon, and Elmyra spilled to the party that Reeve is in fact the head of Urban Planning and a Shinra executive.

After a great effort of concentration Reeve was mostly caught up on the Public Security file Rude had left at his home along with the bottle of painkillers - pausing in his reading at intervals when the words swam on the page and staring into the middle distance. The new instructions didn’t, as near as he could tell, merit the dozens of pages that Heidegger had sent when Reeve was put on leave some days before - they were simple enough. Find the Ancient. Report on new developments. Feed instructions and misinformation, as necessary, to keep the small insurgent cell moving in a direction advantageous to the Shinra corporation.

Spend more time as the cat, with Sephiroth in possession of the Black Materia and Aeris missing and the Neo-Midgar project in danger of toppling. 

Reeve had hardly touched the Neo-Midgar project since before he’d left for Costa del Sol, when he thought about it. He had briefly suspected that he might have done something in the lost blur on either side of the Temple of the Ancients, but when he checked through his email history there was nothing to corroborate the assumption. 

With or without him, Neo-Midgar was moving along just fine - fruitless search for the Promised Land notwithstanding. Maybe Mukki had been right, and his department really was capable of running itself without his intervention. It was a discouraging thought. 

One which left him with the task of operating Cait Sith. 

He hadn’t gone back to the cat, had let the AI run passively in the background flicking the little robot’s ears and tail while Reeve (and much of the rest of AVALANCHE) ignored it in its pile of blankets in the belly of the Tiny Bronco. The thing’s GPS was sending information enough back to Shinra, and the thought of returning and facing the anger and betrayal of the people he had spent so long becoming close with (a mistake, that closeness had been a mistake) felt too exhausting, too painful. 

_Got a whole lotta bones to pick with you,_ Barret had said, and Reeve couldn’t blame him. He’d have been furious in return, situations reversed - but he just didn’t have the energy to face Barret’s well-deserved anger. Wasn’t sure if he had the energy to lie, to keep Shinra’s secrets, when he was already so _tired_. 

He didn’t feel like lying to Barret any more, or to any of the other members of AVALANCHE either. Not when Aeris was missing and Cloud was so deathly pale and silent, and Marlene was stored away as the constant, looming threat on the 42nd floor of the Shinra building. 

Reeve moved from the desk where the project documents were laid out and went to take a nap - something he’d been doing rather a lot, since the new Cait Sith was activated. 

He woke up as the cat anyway. 

\---

The motion of the Tiny Bronco didn’t scream across his nerves the way it had when the link to the replacement Cait Sith was new, but it still left him disoriented and nauseously glad that he hadn’t eaten anything before laying down to sleep. 

The same nest of blankets that had swaddled the little robot in Junon had been carried intact and dropped into the back of the Bronco’s cabin, cool and dark and something of a relief, as far as that went. 

It was the only relief he was getting, he realized, when he picked up the little robot’s head from its cozy cat ball and found Barret already waiting for him. 

“Was wondering when you’d show up,” Barret greeted him, and Reeve winced back, felt the cat crouching down with its ears drooping flat before he’d fully decided to do it and wondered if maybe the link _was_ recovering the way that Hojo had promised it would. 

“Been thinking a lot while you were... out,” Barret continued, his voice coarse and rough, “About a lot of things. You got a lot to answer for” 

They were separated from the rest of the group, as far back as they could get in the cabin without actually being in with the cargo, and Reeve suspected it was by design - the darkness that had first felt like a relief newly threatening. 

“I’ll try to answer your questions as much as I can,” Reeve answered, wondering what he could possibly offer to make up for the list of betrayals he had perpetrated against the group. 

“Not what I meant but it’s a start,” Barret grumbled at him, then sighed and leaned back against the hull of the Bronco, fixing the cat with a speculative expression, “So. Why isn’t my daughter out of a Shinra prison cell yet?” 

“It’s not a prison cell,” Reeve objected before he could think better of it, then cringed back. Because it really was, wasn’t it? A very _nice_ cage, but a cage all the same - a feeling he was becoming increasingly familiar with, “Heidegger won’t be reasoned with, he thinks you won’t cooperate unless he has leverage.” 

“He’s not fucking wrong,” Barret growled in agreement, “What about you, hotshot executive? You need leverage too, so much that you won’t get a little girl out of trouble?” 

“I don’t have the authority,” Reeve tried to defend himself but Barret scowled at him.

“Bullshit. No one above you but the President, Tuesti. You think I’m buying the idea that you have no control?” 

“It’s not my department,” he shook the cat’s head then regretted it as the world spun around him in Midgar. The feeling of helplessness that had been building since the beginning of the Cait Sith project seemed to manifest in that, the difficulty of what should have been a simple movement. When Barret’s scowl deepened, either oblivious to or unmoved by the problematic connection to the cat, Reeve continued, “Heidegger took action through Public Security - he has her guarded by the Turks day and night. Whatever you think, Urban Planning has absolutely no authority with _them_. I had intended to appeal to the President but we were already at the Temple and -” 

Barret made a disgusted noise and Reeve felt sudden anger - whether at the rebuff or at his own sense of helpless frustration no longer seeming to matter, “At least I’m _trying_! The fact alone that Marlene was able to identify me should be evidence enough that I’m sticking my neck out for you. Don’t forget who made her a target with those fucking Reactor attacks! What the hell were you thinking when you did all that, huh? People _died_.” 

He regretted it as soon as it was said. The vehemence of his outburst was undermined by the little robot’s chipper pre-programed vocal range, but it didn’t seem to matter - Barret looked like he had been slapped. Reeve could hear the echo of the words shouted into his home in Midgar where the link didn’t differentiate between the man and the cat. 

“You got a hell of a nerve, accusing me when you’re sittin’ in your ivory tower gettin’ fat on Shinra money and murderin’ the planet! What kind of world is gonna be left for Marlene with no one but people like you around!?”

Barret was leaning toward the cat as his accusations rose in volume, and Reeve felt a shiver down his spine as the robot’s heckles stood along its back. 

“People like me? People trying to build things instead of blowing them up, you mean? How many people did you kill in the Reactor explosions Barret? Why were they an acceptable sacrifice for this vendetta against the power company!?” 

“Don’t dare talk to me about acceptable sacrifices after what Shinra did to Corel and Sector 7!” 

Barret’s gun arm was whirring and clicking madly in parallel to the growing fury in his expression. The rest of AVALANCHE had taken notice and were moving toward them in the back of the cabin, he saw Tifa in his periphery and could hear Cid shouting from up front about not fighting in the plane. 

“If AVALANCHE had stayed away from the Reactors the Turks never would have gone after Sector 7!” 

“Get your head out of your ass! Shinra’s holding the whole world hostage now - if it hadn’t been the Reactors it would have been something else! _Goddamnit_ Reeve, you of all people know what Shinra does!” 

He did know. Had learned too late, but he did know what Shinra would do to keep control. 

The fight went out of him all at once, and he abandoned the cat in the Bronco to scream into his empty Midgar home until he was hoarse. 

\--- 

When he next went back to Cait Sith it was more from habit than by design - slipping down the pathways leading him to the little robot without thinking as he settled onto the sofa with his morning coffee the next day.

Tifa was with Barret when he peered into the cabin of the Bronco, the watch over Cloud apparently passed to Red XIII, at least for the time. 

“You didn’t make camp,” Reeve observed through the cat, and flinched when two sets of eyes turned to glare at him. 

“You slept through it,” Barret answered, “Or whatever the hell it is you do when you’re not here. Got going again as soon as there was daylight.” 

Tifa prodded him gently, and he glared at her shaking his head. 

She fixed him with a tired expression before turning back to the cat, “We saw you back in Midgar, when we were in the Shinra building. Barret and Cloud and I - we know that you tried to prevent what happened in Sector 7.” 

“Didn’t do a very good job of it,” Barret added sullenly and Tifa elbowed him, “But neither did we.” 

Reeve said nothing - ‘thank you’ seemed crass and insufficient, ‘I’m sorry’ would never be enough. 

“Aeris told me to be patient with you, you know,” Tifa told him when it became clear that neither Barret nor the cat was going to add anything else, “It didn’t make sense to me at the time, but... you know how she just _knows_ things sometimes.” 

Reeve did know, in fact. So much that it was uncanny. 

“She said it was like you were always somewhere else,” Tifa continued when the silence stretched, “I had no idea what she was talking about but... she trusts you, at least. That goes a long way, for me.” 

“Thank you, Tifa,” Reeve answered, even as Barret aimed a growling sigh at both of them, “... I wish she was here.” 

“Why,” Barret snapped at him, “So Shinra would have an easier time coming to kidnap her again?” 

_That’s not fair,_ Reeve wanted to answer - except of course that it was. 

\---

Rufus was back on the road by the time that Reeve made it to the office, forestalling his intentions to appeal for Marlene’s release from Shinra custody. 

The day was frustrating in general, he found, between the lingering symptoms of whatever the neural link had done to him and the line up of sub-department managers who (while as perfectly capable of running things as Mukki had predicted) kept showing up and wanting him to _sign_ things. 

The net effect was that it was already past business hours by the time he was able to slip away to give a mission briefing to Heidegger - still uncertain of what he could possibly add to what the man already knew, in light of the circumstances - and he was surprised to find the man’s assistant still at her post in the outer office. 

“Is he in?” he asked the woman, who stared at him with the same disinterested apathy he remembered from their previous interactions. 

She looked at her fingernails before looking back at him, “Welcome back Director Tuesti. I’m afraid if you’re looking for the boss, you’d better go see what _Scarlet_ is doing instead.” 

She spoke Scarlet’s name with such vitriol as to leave absolutely nothing to the imagination what she believed Heiddeger might in fact be doing with _Scarlet_ , and Reeve suppressed a grimace. 

“You know, she’s -”

“So sorry to have missed him,” Reeve cut her off to avoid the onslaught of information that the woman was clearly winding up to unload on someone, having already introduced the name of the Weapons Development director and clearly too piqued to remember that the person she was talking to was in fact another of the executive, “I hope you have a pleasant evening.” 

“Yeah,” she sniffed as he turned away, disinterested again as soon as it became clear that he wasn’t going to stay and hear out her grievances, “You too.” 

Not prepared to deal with whatever Heidegger might have been doing with _Scarlet_ , Reeve made his way down to the 42nd floor. 

Rude was back on guard there, this time perusing a home and garden magazine that looked unambiguously out of place in his gloved hands. Reeve offered a wave and small greeting as he passed, but the man just raised an eyebrow at him and made no reply. 

Reeve wasn’t sure exactly what else he had expected, from the Turks. 

Inside the visitor’s suite the reception was, is anything, cooler than outside it. 

“Where _were_ you?” Marlene demanded with the unapologetic authority of four year olds everywhere. The frown she fixed him with was such a perfect mirror of the one he’d been receiving from her father for the past week it would have been comical, if he’d had any laughter in him. 

“I’m sorry Marlene,” he attempted to pacify her, even as at the back of his mind he notified Barret of the upcoming call, “I wasn’t able to get here.” 

Her skeptical displeasure only broke when Elmyra gently reminded the girl that he had been unwell ( _unwell_ , such a strange way to put it, but Reeve couldn’t think of a better one). Mollified, the girl approached and took the phone from his hands before racing off across the room with it like a treasure. 

“What’s going on?” Elmyra asked him once Marlene was settled in and happily narrating an approximation of the looping stream of cartoons playing on the room’s television. 

“There was an incident,” he explained, and when it felt flimsy slumped into one of the chairs across the table from her, “I was subjected to certain... _augmentations_ that let me be in both places at once. There was a problem at the other end and...”

He looked at the pinched expression and realized that, of course, she had never been asking about him. His stomach sank. 

“Aeris is missing,” he admitted, and when the worry on her face took on fresh urgency added hurriedly, “as far as I know she’s alright. She left the main AVALANCHE group during some confusion not long after you spoke to her and began moving north on her own. We - AVALANCHE - were able to follow her as far as Junon, but she boarded a transport ship scheduled to make multiple stops. AVALANCHE is following her now, but only have a copy of the ship’s manifest to go on, and it’s slow going. We haven’t heard any _bad_ news yet, though.” 

He realized as he was speaking that the information he was sharing with Elmyra was very similar to the briefing he should have been delivering to Heidegger, and absolutely nothing like the information he should have been sharing with Shinra hostages... but faced with the relief of the woman in front of him he couldn’t particularly bring himself to care. 

“Thank goodness,” Elmyra answered him, and after a moment’s thoughtful pause reached to pat his hand a couple of time in a way that was more matronly than was necessarily appropriate considering she wasn’t so much older than Reeve himself, “I don’t know even part of the things going on with you, Director, but it seems like you’re trying to help. And you look like shit.” 

Reeve stared at her for a dumbfounded moment before answering, “Thank you?”

“Don’t thank me,” she shook her head, “the world isn’t going to thank you for trying to play both sides.” 

_I’m getting that impression,_ he wanted to say, or possibly even, _I don’t think I know which side I’m on anymore._

But those were dangerous thoughts, and anyway (he thought of Rude, out on guard and newly icy in the face of Reeve’s attempt at camaraderie) there was no knowing who was listening.


	35. Chapter 35

Evening call with Marlene completed, Reeve slipped out of the 42nd story suite at the same time he began slipping away from Cait Sith, only to be called back by Barret’s deep rumble. 

“Hey, Tuesti, don’t take off yet.”

He flinched at the use of his name, then hesitated - Barret’s tone was deep and authoritative in the impersonal way was becoming used to, but it lacked much of the hostility that had been present in their recent interactions. 

He did a dizzying reverse of mental processes to reinhabit the cat as the elevator doors closed behind him. 

“What’s going on with the cat?” Barret asked him when he had the little robot’s ears perk up and tilted its chin to focus sensors on the man. 

The list was long. The churning nausea that was a constant presence accompanying his time as Cait Sith, the way that conversations in the Tiny Bronco ground to a halt as soon as someone noticed that the robot was active (something the team seemed keen at distinguishing since learning of the difference between the man and the AI)... If he was honest with himself - and he’d been trying to be, since returning from Costa del Sol to find his employers were holding hostages and threatening his family - there was also the concern that the less time he spent in the cat, the less likely he was to overhear something that Shinra could use against people that he had started to care for. 

“You’re hardly ever... here... anymore,” Barret prompted when Reeve didn’t answer right away. 

Reeve blinked at how near the observation ran to his own thoughts, “Would you like me to be?” 

“No way,” Barret answered quickly, and Reeve wasn’t sure exactly what he had expected, “But as long as you’re here, you might as well be _here_. That link workin’ okay?” 

Reeve paused where he was out of the express elevators and halfway across the parking garage. He gave the neural link his full attention, let Barret’s face sharpen to crystal focus in his mind’s eye - a longer process than it had been even when Cait Sith was first deployed to the Gold Saucer.

“There are some problems,” he admitted after consideration, and watched Barret’s thoughtful frown in response. 

“How bad?”

“... I’m not fully certain.” 

Barret shook his head, “It’s not good, you know. Fine, sure, as long as we’re on the Bronco, but we’re gonna find Aeris - find her _soon_ \- and we’re gonna need to get going again to deal with Sephiroth and Shi- well. To deal with things.”

Reeve allowed the cat to nod, and Barret continued decisively, “If you’re gonna be here, and I guess you’ve decided to be, no one’s gonna have time to carry your ass around.” 

As much as he wanted to protest the idea that he had any agency left regarding Cait Sith’s presence in AVALANCHE, he limited himself to saying, “I’ve got the moogle.” 

“Bullshit,” Barret snorted back, “Fell on your damn ass the last time you tried, we all saw it.” 

It was true, of course, in a very literal sense. The AI had overbalanced the cat where it perched on top of its furry mount and tumbled to the ground. It may even have been a good thing that the resulting vertigo had taken Reeve with it, because at least that way no one had found it strange when he suddenly shouted into the middle of a department meeting in Midgar as he landed hard against the table. He’d claimed to have tripped over a projector wire, but had seen the looks circulating the room - one more problem he was going to have to address eventually. 

“What do you propose?” he asked rather than arguing the point. 

Barret held up a finger again, the same way he had back in Junon when Reeve had first floated back into the awareness of Cait Sith in a way that he could, to some extent, control. 

“Can you track this yet?” Barret asked him.

Reeve found that, with effort, he could - the robot’s nose tilting back and forth as it followed the target Barret was providing, although it made Reeve’s head spin in Midgar and he was grateful to have retreated to the relative dark and privacy offered by his car. 

“Good,” Barret affirmed, then continued, “Okay, can you grab it?” 

Reeve reached out with Cait Sith’s paw and missed by a wide margin, closing over empty air. 

Barret sighed, although not as loudly as Reeve himself did as he dropped the driver seat back at an angle and massaged his temples, the persistent headache he’d lived with for the past weeks spiking as he forced his concentration to the far end of the neural link. 

“Again,” Barret prompted him. 

He missed again, then after a moment of consideration swiped to the side to wrap the robot’s paw around Barret’s finger. 

“Good. Again.” 

Barret withdrew and moved his hand. 

It was all very clinical, and terribly frustrating - grab, miss, swipe, grab, move, try again. 

It was also comforting. There was no kind of connection, exactly, as there had been when Cait Sith had been only Cait Sith - but it was so familiarly, recognizably _Barret_ , helping even though he was angry; planning solutions to problems that hadn’t happened yet; still worried about the cohesion of the team while everyone was busy getting caught up in their own troubles. 

“I had to do this a lot back when the first link was activated,” Reeve admitted, missing a target point twice then connecting on the third try, “How did you know to...?”

Barret shrugged and waved around the empty space that the gun would occupy when they stopped somewhere he might need it, “Had a bit of experience, you know.”

Reeve supposed he must have, but Barret’s sudden frown stopped him from asking more about it. He wondered though, what it had been like for the man, so raw from the loss of so much at once, trying to learn that too - to rewrite the connections of a limb that wasn’t there any more. 

He wanted to ask if it had made it easier or harder, having the painful job of learning the prosthetic on top of everything else he had lost, but didn’t dare in light of Barret’s dark expression... still he felt again the quiet admiration for the man that had become such a quintessential part of his interactions with AVALANCHE. 

\---

Barret’s decision to get the cat up and moving properly proved prophetic when, halfway through a call with Marlene the next night, Cloud groaned suddenly and coughed. It was more life than he had shown in days - and the attention of the entire of AVALANCHE was summoned by the movement. 

Barret looked stricken between Cloud and Cait Sith, and without thinking Reeve said, “I’ll explain to Marlene. Go check.” 

“Thanks, cat,” Barret’s shoulders dropped with relief and he ruffled the fur on the top of Cait Sith’s head before turning to rush across the cabin with the rest of the team. 

“I -” Reeve shook his head and decided he would need to deal with that later, instead pulling away from the neural link to explain to Marlene why the call needed to be cut off. 

She frowned at him at first - that same displeased expression so resonant of her father - but when he told her that Cloud was sick and needed Barret’s help her face transformed at once to childish recognition and concern. 

“He gave me a flower, one time. It was yellow and Tifa put it in a vase,” Marlene Informed him solemnly, and Reeve nodded along. 

“Of course he did. And now he needs help to be okay. So, tomorrow night?” 

Marlene nodded seriously and handed him back the phone. 

Reeve turned his attention to Elmyra but she shook her head at him, “Go take care of what you have to and get my daughter back.” 

He nodded and made his grateful escape - slowing when Rude fixed him with an inquiring look.

“Strife’s awake,” he explained after a cursory glance around to confirm they were alone. 

Rude nodded and got to his feet, sliding a phone from an inner pocket, but Reeve was already in motion again, eager to get back to his office where he could give the situation his full attention without arousing suspicion - his mind halfway back to the cat by the time he hit the elevators. 

In the Tiny Bronco, Cloud was sitting up, pulled upright against Barret behind him while Tifa crouched in front, eyes fixed intently on his blurry expression while she helped him lift a bottle of water to his mouth. 

The young man’s eyes were heavy and hardly open, to Reeve’s perception, but he was undeniably _awake_ as he hadn’t been in over a week, mumbling between sips of water about Sephiroth and Black Materia. 

“What about Aeris?” Tifa asked him desperately, scanning his face for something Reeve couldn’t understand. 

“She went to the sleeping forest,” Cloud answered, then dropped his head backward against Barret and closed his eyes again. The water bottle slipped from his hand and Tifa grabbed at it before it spilled. 

“Sleeping forest?” Tifa prompted him, but he only mumbled in response and flinched away from her attempts to coax more information from him. 

The young man began to slide sideways and Barret grabbed him tighter to keep him sitting upright, looking thoughtful. 

“Is he dreaming?” Tifa asked, and Barret offered her a small shrug, looking further to where Red XIII and Vincent had approached when Cloud had begun to stir. 

“I don’t believe so,” Red XIII answered in his place, “There are stories about such places told in Cosmo Canyon. Where spirit energy collects and the land becomes caught in a dream state. It’s not inconceivable that...” 

“Hey, I have heard of _that_ ,” Barret added when the Cosmo Beast trailed off, “In one of the planetology journals - a spot showed up on the northern continent a couple of years ago.”

It had. The location in question had been mentioned more than once in the reports landing on Reeve’s desk through the many occasions the Neo-Midgar project had been resurrected and fallen back into dormancy over the past half-dozen years. International Development would prepare a series of surveys and local research only to find the project shoved to the backburner again by the time they could deliver. 

“I know where it is,” he announced through Cait Sith, then flinched when half of AVALANCHE turned to face him at once. 

He ought to be consulting with Heidegger ahead of giving AVALANCHE that much information, before giving them that kind of head start, but... Aeris had been missing for too long. AVALANCHE was more and more strained every day. Elmyra was more and more strained every day. 

Shinra would find out soon enough anyway - as soon as the heading changed on the moogle’s GPS tracker. 

“There’s a port on the southern coast of the northern continent that Shinra established when they were still actively researching the location. Start heading north and I’ll have the coordinates available as soon as possible.” 

When he paused, Tifa and Barret looked toward one another again before Tifa nodded, and Barret shouted to the front of the plane, “Hey, Cid, turn ‘er around, would ya?”

“The hell?” Cid’s shout floated back from the cockpit, “We’re nearly in Kalm.” 

“Change ‘a plans,” Barret shot back, “The cat says we’re goin’ north.” 

He turned his attention back to Cait Sith, and maybe out of deference to Cloud (who was frowning and moaning as Tifa again tried to ply him with water) dropped his voice back down. 

“... Helped us at the Temple, Tuesti,” he acknowledged, “And I’m real grateful for that. But you screw us on this, and you’re done.” 

Reeve concentrated to have his robot avatar nod solemnly, “I understand.”


	36. Chapter 36

Reeve was back in his office for less than fifteen minutes when Scarlet walked in unannounced, Heidegger half a step behind her and looking unkempt in a way that Reeve didn’t care to think about. 

“ _Reeve!_ ” the woman was barking at him even as he got to his feet to greet her, and he felt the corner of his mouth trying to pull down in distaste at the over-familiarity. 

“Lovely to see you, Director,” he reached to shake her hand but she was already waving him off. 

“Forget that,” Scarlet snapped at him and he _didn’t_ fight the urge to frown, “You’re on a new heading.” 

Heidegger cleared his throat and in the moments that she paused to look at him clarified, “Got word from our friend on the 42nd.”

“Yes, that,” Scarlet agreed before turning on Reeve, “And the heading has changed, the Cait Sith unit reversed directions almost as soon the Turk called in.” 

Reeve stared at her, unsure for a moment how to reply. He knew that Shinra was tracking the robots’ coordinates, but it was the first time he was being confronted with how closely they were doing it. It was… unsettling, and it was something he would need to consider more critically as soon as he had a moment free for considering. 

“Yes,” he agreed, trying to rally his attention to the immediate conversation, “Strife woke up and reported that,” _Aeris,_ “the Ancient went north toward the old Bone Village dig site. AVALANCHE reversed course directly.” 

Scarlet made a small noise of irritation, “I suppose it lines up with the damned clones.” 

“The clones?” Reeve echoed before frowning, “Those poor things are trying to get to-”

“They think they’re following Sephiroth, if Hojo’s got a damn clue about it.” 

His stomach dropped unpleasantly. _Sephiroth._ Surely Aeris wasn’t also following...?

He had yet to encounter the man directly since his reappearance in the Shinra building a few months prior, but the trail of casualties spoke for itself. The former President. Tseng... the dozens of Shinra infantry and SOLDIERs who’d had the misfortune to cross with the man. Who knew how many civilians. 

Reeve barely fought back the urge to bolt into the cat and give warning. It wouldn’t help anyway - the Bronco was already moving as quickly as it sustainably could. 

“Will you send the military to deal with Sephiroth?” Reeve asked instead. 

Heidegger scowled and shook his head with an expression of distaste, “The new President wants to keep the crisis quiet for as long as possible in light of the recent power transition... wants to reserve the army for making a show of force.”

Scarlet snickered, and ignored Heidegger when he turned his glare on her, “A small guerilla group is the better choice not to draw too much suspicion. Let AVALANCHE take point as they did at the Temple... and if they can’t handle it, at least we'll have one fewer problem to deal with later.” 

Reeve ignored the growing sick feeling in his stomach. Her treatment of AVALANCHE was familiar to him, but the exact details were lost in the fog of the past weeks.

“What about the Ancient?” he asked instead.

“We’ll have the Turks in place in the event that AVALANCHE fails. In the interim, AVALANCHE is still useful on their current path,” Heidegger assured him, then after a thoughtful pause added, “I’ll sign off on any extra equipment you think will keep them moving in the right direction. Scarlet can review that with you now that she’s been fully briefed on the situation. Just get the Ancient back _asap_.”

Reeve cringed as Heidegger actually pronounced the abbreviation, but was spared commenting when the man stepped forward to clap him on the shoulder a couple of times, “Use whatever budget you need on this Reeve, and keep letting us know about new leads. You’re doing fine,” he cleared his throat, “Now, if you’ll excuse me I’m going to leave you with Scarlet to work out the details.” 

“Heidegger is a fool,” Scarlet announced as soon as the man was safely out the room, the tone of the meeting shifting so abruptly as to give Reeve a sense of cognitive whiplash, “And I’ll be damned if I let him send our experimental technology to a group clearly allied with Wutai.” 

“Allied with-” Reeve stopped himself. Of course. Yuffie. He cleared his throat, “Yes, of course. What would you propose as an alternative?”

“Send them gil and let them figure it out on their own. They’ve done at least as well as Heidegger’s bumbling so far and let us keep Shinra’s name out of things,” the woman crossed to his desk and leaned against it, crossing her legs and exposing a long strip of thigh through the high slit of her dress. 

Scarlet was, as far as Reeve was concerned, positively terrifying. And, based on her extended tenure as the head of weapons development, the only Shinra executive to reach the position at an earlier age than he had himself. 

“I’m not sure what I can do for you in that case, Director,” Reeve answered her as stiffly as he dared. 

The woman offered a small hum and shifted until her dress slid incrementally further open over her leg, then rolled her eyes when she seemed to realize all at once that the action was making Reeve uncomfortable in a way other than the one she had intended. 

“Hojo’s not giving me full reports on the state of the Cait Sith robots,” she scowled, getting back to her feet and letting her dress fall back into place, to Reeve’s relief. 

“I’m not sure how much I can help you with Hojo,” Reeve answered her honestly, before adding, “What did you want to know?” 

She looked him up and down appraisingly, and he felt suddenly aware of how his physical condition had deteriorated (sharply in the time since the destruction of the first Cait Sith, but even before that, going back to the time the neural link had first been installed and activated). 

“We’re looking to expand the project. Remote combat units were always the end game, as you know.” 

He nodded his agreement and she continued. 

“How is the transfer to the new model working?” 

“Better and worse than we could have expected,” he answered, “Getting it into action has been much faster than the initial units, but...” 

Scarlet picked up as he trailed off, fixing him with a thoughtful expression that made his skin break out in gooseflesh unpleasantly, “Hmm, yes. Hojo told me you were in medical. Maybe a longer window for regular forces until we can iron that out. What are the remaining symptoms?” 

He hesitated. The woman’s direct attention was more troubling than he had ever expected based on their brief encounters in the boardroom. Like being left alone with a large predator. 

Why hadn’t he noticed it sooner? Found some pretext for Heidegger to stay? 

“You’ll have to consult with Hojo for the specifics, unfortunately,” he cleared his throat in a way that he hoped didn’t betray his nerves, “I can only tell you that there’s a continued problem with the fine motor control across the neural link. We’re working on it.” 

“We?”

“Barret has been-” he stopped when he realized his mistake, but it was already out of his mouth and Scarlet had already fixed him with a look that reaffirmed his impression of being with a predator. He made an effort to stare her down anyway, “A member of AVALANCHE has been helping to retrain the AI at the Cait Sith end of the connection. Progress is slow.” 

“I see. Which one is Barret?” she began closing the space between them in a way that he found less comfortable than when she had just been displaying her leg, and which signalled unambiguously that she would not be intimidated - at least not by Reeve Tuesti.

“The former leader of the AVALANCHE group,” he cleared his throat again - nervously this time, and there was no hiding it - and tried to think. For some reason it felt like she was on the attack both against him and against the man on the distant end of the neural link. When he saw no recognition to his description he added, “Marlene’s father. The little girl downstairs? He-”

_He’s a good man,_ was nearly out of his mouth in his nervous haste, but he caught himself. It was a dangerous thing to say to Scarlet. It was also a dangerous opinion for him to be holding personally, and was the first time his thoughts on the man had emerged in quite that formation. 

He would definitely need to reflect later on exactly how much of the opinion was factual and how much was the result of his own misguided attachment - but it wasn’t the time.

“He what?” Scarlet prompted and Reeve realized he had frozen.

“He’s very invested in keeping the team in order. He’s a valuable asset to them. To us, as long as we have leverage.” 

The woman’s face turned speculative, and Reeve wondered if he had slipped somewhere, if something had shown on his face during the pause. Whatever else Scarlet was, she was good at her job, and he didn’t think she got to where she was by missing details. 

“... I see,” she finally agreed, then made a face, “Whatever. What is the cat doing now?” 

“Not much,” he answered and, newly cautious, schooled his features as soon as he spoke, “AVALANCHE is in motion and the robots are in storage except for a few hours a day. You can check your GPS log if you feel the need, it seems you have better records than I was first led to imagine.” 

Scarlet offered him a tight smile, “You are piloting the culmination of years of classified research, _Director_. Surely don’t expect us to let it walk out into the world without certain precautions?” 

“Of course not,” he mirrored her guarded expression, then gestured toward the office door, “Now, I hate to be rude, but I find myself with a significant amount of research to do before the end of the evening. If you would excuse me, _Director_?” 

Scarlet stared hard at him for a long moment, long enough that he began to wonder if she would stand her ground just to prove a point, before her shoulders shifted back and she tossed her hair, “Of course, you are a busy man, Reeve. Please keep me apprised of any new developments in the Cait Sith project.” 

“Heidegger will continue to receive my full reports, as usual,” Reeve answered, and her eyes narrowed briefly in response, so quickly that he might have missed it if he wasn’t specifically looking for it, “I’m sure you can arrange something with him.” 

She flashed him a smile with too many teeth in it before turning to leave, “Have a good evening, Reeve.” 

“You as well, Scarlet.” 

When she was gone and the door closed behind her he slumped into his chair and pinched the bridge of his nose.

The sudden absence of Scarlet in the office left Reeve feeling adrift, with the sense that he had an awful lot of things he needed to consider and not a lot of time to consider them in. He scoured his memory for instances of finding himself in a similar position before his appointment to the executive and the Cait Sith project, and couldn’t think of anything. International Development had involved negotiations, alliances, _diplomacy_ , certainly - but negotiating for resource rights and establishing reactors and Shinra outposts in new locations had always been easy to navigate. Whatever calculations now drove the motivations of his fellow executives were being played close to the chest, and gave him the uncomfortable feeling that he was perpetually two steps behind. 

More than the sense that he was out of step with his colleagues, he was struck by the feeling that Heidegger had seemed colder, somehow, than he had in their previous dealings over the Cait Sith project. The man didn’t lack any proximity with Scarlet, though (he thought shudderingly of his encounter with the man’s jilted secretary) and he wondered if Scarlet’s sudden inclusion in the meeting was signalling some shift in Heidegger’s alliances and loyalties inside the project. 

If Scarlet had found a way to influence Heidegger (his mind butted briefly against the memory of her exposed leg before skittering unhappily away from the logistics of the issue) it was entirety possible that she would soon be getting more information regarding the Cait Sith project than just the performance data on the units. He didn’t like to think what that kind of development might mean for Cait Sith, and by extension for AVALANCHE. The woman was... ruthless. Moreso than Heidegger, at least. 

He pushed it from his mind and turned his attention to the problem of the Bone Village dig site. He really did have a lot to review before the end of the evening.


	37. Chapter 37

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Much of the dialogue from the final scene is taken directly from the game, although the setting is different.
> 
> Chapter warning for excessive swearing.

It was closing on midnight by the time that Reeve wrapped up the research he had intended when he ushered Scarlet from his office, and the hours had been punctuated by frustrating extended pauses as the information on the documents swam in front of him each time he stared too long or hard. 

It was a forcible reminder that whatever effects the damaged link was having on Cait Sith, it was still affecting him, as well. 

He pushed away the last document from the pile he had been perusing and rubbed his temples tiredly. He’d sent the relevant information regarding AVALANCHE’s new heading through to the intelligence team, but much of the information he’d needed about the Sleeping Forest was stored in the archives of his own department. It had seemed faster for him to retrieve the preliminary information directly, gathering files with the help of the single overnight archivist kept on staff for such occasions. 

Reviewing old projects was the kind of work he had enjoyed in the past - when the stakes were lower and the timeframe more forgiving. As it was, he had perused the backlog of documents he’d carried up to his office with increasing agitation as he failed to find the kind of smoking-gun results he was hoping for. 

The surveys undertaken by the department at the time had all been cut off before any concrete conclusions had been reported, leaving the history and the local conditions of the area as much a mystery as when the phenomenon had emerged some twenty years earlier while the Wutai War was still a live conflict. What he did find, in the piles of folders, was a lot of speculations and hypotheses and not a lot of conclusions. 

And one remaining archeological research post in place at a local village, funded by the University of Midgar. 

The university, in turn, was funded by Shinra. 

It was something. 

He scribbled down the contact information for the project director, resolved to get in contact at the start of business regarding any ongoing research or developments pending publication, and to make a plan that would allow AVALANCHE to obtain passage through the area with minimal resistance. 

There could even be news of Aeris, if he got lucky. 

He stood from his desk and stretched until his back popped satisfyingly and thought about heading home. Then, he looked at the clock. 

He thought that if he was fast, he might be able to communicate what he had found to the rest of AVALANCHE without waking anyone. 

With he set an alarm and resigned himself to another night on the office sofa. 

\---

When he opened his eyes as Cait Sith, the little robot was still in its blanket nest in the back of the Tiny Bronco. Also in the cabin were two more piles of blankets that he thought were most likely Cid and Yuffie. One of the piles was snoring softly when he tottered to his feet and crept between them to the main hatch, and he saw a tuft of short cropped blond hair in the low light that confirmed half of his suspicion. 

When after a few false starts he grasped the handle to push the hatch open, the other sleeper snuffled far enough awake to complain of the cold - definitely Yuffie. Her motion sickness did seem to have the same hold on her with the plane rocking gently in its moorings at the docks, and Reeve supposed it would be a comfortable feeling, coupled with the sound of the waves against the hull, if his connection to Cait Sith had been a little less raw. As things were, it left his senses spinning at the edges and made the robot’s motions more wobbly than he was necessarily comfortable with. 

He supposed he could have woken one of them to share the results of the research, but neither had the experience to make decisions about a requisition list for the team if he did as Heidegger suggested and sent gear and supplies to meet the group. For that, it would take someone with experience in the logistics of leading a small force. Barret, or maybe Vincent.

Cait Sith reached down to shut the hatch behind him from his carefully balanced spot on the hull of the plane, then appraised the jump from the Bronco to the dock where it was moored. The space was less than a meter, not much to ask from the robot’s capabilities. 

He contemplated the jump, and contemplated Heidegger’s instructions regarding AVALANCHE.

He knew the robot would be fine if it fell in the water - probably - but the thought of landing beneath the dark waves in the middle of the night sent chills up his spine. The robot didn’t need to breathe, but the man still did - and he wasn’t eager to find out exactly how that particular experience would interface with the neural link. 

Thinking of his purpose, it also hadn’t escaped his notice that he’d been instructed to send funds and supplies to a known terrorist organization - even if the head of Public Security did intend to lend his approval to the endeavour. 

There wasn’t a lot to do about _that_ part of his concerns in the middle of the night in a nameless port off the northern sea, hundreds of kilometers from Midgar. 

The water, he could deal with. 

He gauged the jump and carefully - _carefully_ \- made the leap. 

He didn’t overshoot by much (landing with a hard _thump_ ) and would have been fine if the old wooden boards hadn’t been slick with algae and sea water, sending Cait Sith sliding past the midway point and toward the water on the other side. 

“Shit shit _shit!_ ” Reeve cursed along with the cat, grabbing wildly for traction and finding none, until the robot’s trajectory was interrupted by a post anchoring the floating docks in place. Cait Sith came to a rest with small booted feet hanging over a drop directly to the sea floor. 

He pulled himself back properly onto the docks and got the cat to its feet, shaky with adrenaline at the near miss. In the midnight dark of his office, Reeve found himself breathing hard as the AI’s urgency blasted into his mind, and he took a moment to nervously straighten Cait Sith’s little crown before beginning the walk to shore. 

The port town _was_ familiar, he realized as he saw the line of small homes against the waterfront and turned to see a lighthouse standing against a bank of cliffs far to his right. He couldn’t remember the name of the place (or if it even had one), home to some couple of hundred locals and dock employees receiving goods to ship to Midgar. He’d visited the place a few years prior over a long weekend, near enough to the city that he’d been able to drive without taking any time off. 

It gave him a rare sense of ease, as if the proximity to Midgar made his other self somehow more accessible, the rest of AVALANCHE more tangible when considered in terms of their nearness. 

He briefly entertained the idea that his companions might be feeling a similar sense of familiarity being so close to Midgar, then dismissed it quickly. 

If any of them felt any nostalgia for Midgar it was for their home in the ruins of Sector 7, and the reminder couldn’t have been a happy one. 

When Cait Sith had made his lurching, stumbling way nearly to the center of the tiny hamlet (each step a little easier, a little more practiced even as Reeve’s mind rebelled at the strain) he spotted two familiar figures approaching him from the other direction - Red XIII identifiable first from the bright beacon of his tail, then Vincent gliding forward inside the oddly organic movement of his cloak. 

“Cait Sith,” the Cosmo Beast greeted him when they were close enough to speak without yelling, and Reeve thought that the creature looked almost pleased, “It has been some time since you ventured out on your own. You look... better.” 

The _‘better’_ was hesitant and Reeve knew for certain it was untrue, covered as the cat was in dock slime from his tumble - but supposed that wasn’t necessarily what Red XIII had meant. 

“I spent the evening in the archives,” he regarded the two in front of him, and remembered his decision that the matter of requisitions needed to be taken to Vincent or Barret. Sinkingly, he realized that he’d only actually had one destination the entire time, “Barret and Tifa are...?”

“With Cloud,” Vincent’s breath hung in the air in front of him. The nights were getting colder, and it was only going to get worse, “We were able to rent an empty home for the night, but…” 

Red XIII picked up where the quiet man trailed off, “We felt it best not to go without some kind of patrol, being so near to Midgar and Shinra.” 

“Of course,” Cait Sith nodded, and Reeve didn’t feel it wise to point out that Shinra’d had their location as soon as they had stopped, could have picked them up any time it was convenient no matter where they stopped. 

He fell into step behind them and was led across the square and down a side alley. It occurred to him that they were shortening their strides to allow him to keep pace - nice, he supposed, even if it did cause him to feel a flare of irritation with his own new limitations. 

The pair hesitated at the end of the alley and listened. 

Cait Sith’s sensors were just able to pick up the sound of quiet voices from the other side of a heavy door - normal, for the design of the robot... but the pause between Vincent and Red XIII indicating that they too were aware of the sound highlighted to him again just how unusual his travelling companions really were. 

Vincent knocked twice at the door then opened it and gestured Cait Sith inside, closing the door behind him after he entered. 

The room was lit low with an oil lamp, furnishings tired in the way of spare rooms everywhere. Cloud, who had gotten to his feet briefly after waking that afternoon, was back into a deep sleep in a bed by the wall. Barret and Tifa sat at a small table near a wood stove and turned as he entered, their conversation falling silent at the intrusion. 

“Half surprised you didn’t come yourself, after everything,” Barret greeted him with a tone that didn’t reflect any particular surprise. 

“Myself?” 

“Don’t play dumb, Tuesti,” the man’s voice rose roughly with irritation, then rolled his eyes when Tifa hushed him while glancing at Cloud. 

It hadn’t occurred to him to go in person, although he thought it perhaps should have. To drive all night and be there in the flesh, for whatever short time he could manage. It was tempting, once the thought was in his mind - to be someone other than the struggling robot for some short window. 

Disastrously as that had gone in Costa del Sol. 

“It’s good to see Cait Sith up and moving on his own,” Tifa interrupted by adding her own greeting, although he suspected that the statement was half directed at Barret. 

“I was in the archives until a little while ago,” he answered by way of changing the subject. It was the truth, and didn’t require him to examine his motivations too closely, “I wanted to let you know as quickly as possible - what?” 

Tifa looked guilty, but her wrinkled nose and pinched expression didn’t abate

“Don’t take this wrong, Cait, but you kind of stink.” 

“Smell like you brought a couple a’ dead fish with you,” Barret clarified when he didn’t immediately reply.

After a moment’s thought Reeve directed Cait Sith’s gaze to examine where his skid across the docks had left a trail of slime through the cat’s fur. 

Right. The robots were never designed to have a sense of smell. 

“Sorry,” he cringed, and the cat’s ears dropped without his planning it - that, at least, he registered distantly as promising. Even if it made the sides of his face itch. 

“Utility sink?” Tifa asked, looking at Barret.

“Cat’s waterproof, right?” Barret asked Cait Sith. 

“It is,” Reeve confirmed. 

He regretted it immediately as Barret stood from the table to grab the little robot by the scruff of the neck and carried it toward the sink Tifa had mentioned. 

“Hey! Hey!” Reeve protested as the link to Cait Sith sent a wave of pins and needles down his spine while a phantom pressure covered his shoulder blades, and he swung the cat’s paws wildly - and futilely - looking for traction. 

He’d barely recovered from the AI’s insistence that he was under attack and registered the indignity of the situation when he was dropped unceremoniously into the sink.

“Sorry about this,” Tifa warned, suddenly beside him, before the cat was being sprayed from arm’s length. 

“What’d you actually come out for, anyway?” Barret asked him, watching the proceedings from a safe distance. 

He struggled to process the question through the scream of the link that warned him of _Attack!_ and _Danger!_ faced with the jet of water washing the remnants of ocean from Cait Sith’s fur - but after a moment he gathered his wits to answer, “In the archives. There’s no published information in Shinra records about the forest. There’s a small outpost though - Bone Village, they call it, I think that’s a joke - it’s an active archeological site funded by Shinra through the University of Midgar.” 

The neural link conveyed the spray of water as it hit his stomach as biting and painful, and Reeve made a concerted effort not to leap out of Cait Sith’s consciousness in response. Still, he grabbed at his stomach where - in spite of his perceptions - he knew there was nothing actually wrong. 

“So we’re going to Bone Village?” Barret asked, then rolled his eyes when Tifa snorted. 

After a moment’s consideration, Reeve realized why she was laughing. The place was run by students - of course it was a double pun. 

Well, he had to suppose that her bar in the slums _had_ entertained a bawdy crowd. 

“I’m going to be in contact with the university in the morning to see what the current situation is there, and to let them know to expect AVALANCHE -”

“ _Expect_ us?” Barret protested. 

“It’s a small outpost,” Reeve answered, and when the Cait Sith AI notified him of moisture saturation above the acceptable threshold allowed it to shake the water from the cat’s fur enthusiastically at around the same time that the spray from the hose began to hit around his ankles.

“Cait!” Tifa protested, holding up the arm not holding the nozzle to guard her face from the water. 

“Sorry! Sorry! The AI-” 

He paused when the full scope of the tableau they must have made caught up with him. The middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, trying to plan out the logistics of getting a rogue eco-terrorist group access to an archeological dig site, while Tifa hosed him down like the family pet. 

In spite of the urgency, and in spite of the neural link still warning him (quite insistently) that the water posed some kind of threat, he began to laugh. 

A small chuckle at first, mirrored by Tifa after a pause in which she turned off the water, and then - dignity be damned - full blown laughter that burbled from the man and the cat at the same time even as Tifa dropped a towel over Cait Sith’s head, giggling alongside.

“Damnit this isn’t playtime,” Barret growled at both of them, and Cait Sith managed to grasp and pull the towel away from his cameras in time to see Tifa hold up her hands appeasingly, “The cat shows up in the middle of the night and tells us that Shinra’s already expecting us at our next stop before he’s even told us how to get there?”

Sobering abruptly, Cait Sith gathered the towel to himself contritely as his fur dripped into the sink. In Midgar, Reeve took a deep breath and rubbed his temples.

It was getting easier to be the cat again, for short stretches, but controlling the robot and trying to process everything he needed to convey to his teammates was pulling him in two different directions. 

“It’s a small site,” he reiterated through the robot, “They wouldn’t have the space or supplies to accommodate an additional eight individuals without forewarning. At any rate, Shinra has no interest in taking AVALANCHE into custody -”

“- and how long is that going to last?” 

“Does it make a difference right now?” Reeve answered more sharply than he had intended. He sighed again and offered a small shrug through the cat, “The executive team is currently more invested in how AVALANCHE can act outside Shinra’s central chain of command and accountability. For now at least, it appears that our objectives are aligned - I was given instructions today to provide whatever funding and gear you need to retrieve Aeris safely.” 

“ _Retrieve_?” Tifa’s voice surprised him in how aghast she sounded, “She’s a _person_.” 

Reeve cringed, mirrored by the cat, “Wrong word, I’m sorry. I’ve been dealing with Shinra people much of the evening.” 

“You are Shinra people,” Barret growled back at him. 

“... Ultimately, everyone wants Aeris back safe,” Cait Sith answered, the chipper tone of the robot’s voice doing a poor job of conveying his contrition even to his own ears. Somehow, it made him wish even more intensely that Aeris was _already_ back safe - she was always the one who seemed able to smooth out bruised feelings, her presence acting as a balm on the rest of the team, “And Shinra believes themselves to have sufficient leverage over you that they feel secure funding your operations at this time.” 

“You mean my _daughter_.” 

“... I’m sorry.” 

“And for that you want us to take Shinra’s dirty money and do their bidding? Told ya I’m never working for Shinra again,” Barret’s voice was low and dangerous.

“Barret...” he started, and was saved having to think of what to say when Cloud moaned from across the room and began to stir. 

Barret’s attention was immediately redirected toward where Cloud was struggling to sit up, taking the few steps across the room to grab his shoulder and help him to get upright. 

Reeve for his part was grateful to avoid the fight - suspecting that anything he said next could only have made things worse. Whatever other feeling he might have about Barret, his earlier impulse to call Barret a good man was cementing itself in his mind, a point of certainty in the bizarre kaleidoscope his life was becoming. 

The thought of arguing with him, in light of that, made Reeve uneasy about his own moral standing. 

“What’s going on?” Cloud began asking across the room, wiping groggily at his face as he did.

“Seems like we’re back on Shinra payroll,” Barret grumbled, shooting a look at Cait Sith even as he helped to keep Cloud upright.

“Not happening,” the younger man snapped, sudden lucidity jumping into his expression as he followed Barret’s look toward the cat. 

“Sounds like it’s a done deal,” Barret growled in reply, “Our buddy Tuesti here just showed up to let us know we’re getting the carrot _and_ the stick. They’ve still got Marlene. And their _spy_.” 

The last word was venomous, Barret’s expression tight with accusation, but before Reeve could rally his thoughts into a defense Cloud interrupted.

“Sephiroth?”

Reeve slumped, and Cait Sith mirrored him, “Yes, there’s also the matter of Sephiroth... Hojo believes that the clones - those poor things in Nibelheim and at the Temple,” he clarified when whey looked at him in confusion, “That the clones are also headed north toward the forest. It’s not impossible that Aeris is on the same path.” 

“What the hell?” Barret _did_ shout at him, then, and in his periphery Cait Sith perceived the colour draining from Tifa’s face, “You don’t think you should have started with that?” 

“Would it have helped?” Reeve answered, “You’re already on your way there as quickly as-”

“God _damnit_ , Tuesti, it’s not about what we can do about it,” Barret snapped back at him, “We’ve got a right to _know_! Shit! I can’t even look at you right now!” 

He turned his back and raised the gun arm as if to slam into the wall, then seemed to think the better of it, even as the weapon clattered alarmingly in sympathy with his agitation 

Cloud cleared his throat, “Barret, I think he’s right about where Aeris...”

Barret turned on him, “Don’t start fucking defending him! You’ve started enough shit already, attacking Aeris and giving Sephiroth the Black Materia after the cat went and got himself all fucked up over it!”

Tifa inserted herself between the two and made a placating gesture, “Barret, you need to calm down or-”

“Don’t tell me what I’ve gotta do, Tifa,” he turned on her, “you really think Aeris would have left on her own without these two and their bullshit?”

Tifa looked as if she’d been slapped, and fell furiously silent as Barret continued.

“I’m gonna be _plenty_ pissed off with the _pair_ of ‘em right now and I just -” he broke off with guttural noise of frustration and threw his arms in the air before storming from the room, slamming the door behind him hard enough to make the windows rattle in their frames. 

A few moments later the ongoing clatter from his arm turned into the sound of live gunfire.

“How much did I miss?” Cloud asked after a moment, turning his gaze between Tifa and Cait Sith. 

Tifa sighed, and took a moment to drop another towel over Cait Sith before lifting the robot over to a pile of blankets she’d placed on the table earlier. 

“A lot,” the young woman admitted, staring hard at Cait Sith as she said it, and through the dream-like perception of the neural link Reeve thought that her eyes seemed wet, “but Reeve is right. We’re doing as much as we can about it already... You might as well sleep, Cloud, if you can.”

Cloud did sleep again - after limping to the attached washroom to perform some brief ablutions - his breathing leveling out almost as soon as he laid back down.

“You should sleep too,” Tifa told Cait Sith when she saw Cloud was out, “At least some of us ought to be sleeping.”

Reeve wanted to argue - to stay with her and offer some kind of comfort after delivering the unhappy news that Aeris and Sephiroth might be running on parallel paths - but the strain of the day in Midgar followed by his adventure across town as Cait Sith soon had him dropping down into exhausted sleep.

\---

Cait Sith’s AI briefly dragged Reeve back into a state of half-wakefulness shortly before dawn, showing him that Barret had returned at some point and pulled a chair beside where Cloud was propped up in the bed and picking at a plate of food. 

“You wanna find out about yourself, or are you afraid to find out?” Barret was speaking to Cloud in a soft voice, possibly in deference to the early hour, “Either way, if you stay around here, all you’re gonna do is worry about it... Even if you do go nuts again when you see Sephiroth... if it happens, it happens. I’ll go upside your spikey head and bring you back to normal.”

Cloud dropped his fork to the plate balanced on his knees, and looked away, “But...”

“If it happens, it happens.” Barret answered him firmly, “Don’t worry about it.”

“Barret.”

The big man shook his head and took the plate out of Cloud’s hands, setting it on a side table before continuing. 

“Sorry ‘bout everything earlier, too. Shouldn’t’a said half of it - me and my fucking mouth,” he turned to the side and Reeve followed his gaze to see Tifa also watching quietly from another of the room’s small beds, “Sorry, Tifa.” 

The setting, the conversation, felt too private for Reeve - and he slipped back out of the cat before anyone could notice he was there, an interloper in a group he didn’t belong to. Not really. 

Still, he felt a pang in the morning when the group piled back into the Tiny Bronco on a course that took them further and further from Midgar.


	38. Chapter 38

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so delighted and touched to share some [awesome illustrations](https://twitter.com/mabs_art/status/1352393723418533892) that Mabs made for Ch 20 of this fic - if you aren't already following her on twitter you need to head on over there now to see all her amazing art! 
> 
> As an additional note for this chapter, since Reeve's assistant in the Remake doesn't appear to have a name (and doesn't appear at all in the OG although someone surely must exist in the role) I've borrowed one from another Final Fantasy franchise for the time being. 
> 
> Finally, my apologies for the missed update on this fic over the weekend. Expect updates to move to Wednesdays only for the next week or two.

Startled awake by his alarm, Reeve was already halfway to his feet before realizing that he was alone in his office. 

He sank back onto the sofa and took a few steadying breaths, scrubbing at his face and trying to calm his rapid heartbeat. 

Disoriented awakenings had become increasingly frequent since the activation of the second Cait Sith - or at least he had become more aware of them. Once, he would have gone directly to Hojo and Shinra’s medical team to report a developing side effect of the neural link. 

Instead, he went into the office bathroom to splash some water on his face. He had some vague recollection of having woken somewhere else in the night, like a dream, but it was mostly gone. What he did remember was Cait Sith’s trip across the tiny port village and exhausted, giddy laughter with Tifa as the cat’s AI acted out some of its stranger programming... Followed by the sting of Barret’s justified anger. 

The sting lingered where the laughter didn’t, settling into his stomach with a sinking, sick feeling. 

Deciding that the person staring back at him from the mirror _looked_ like a man who had spent the night sleeping on an office sofa, he slunk down to the company gym to use the showers. 

\---

When he arrived back at his office his assistant had already arrived for the day, and she held him back as he was trying to get directly to the call with the University of Midgar archeology department. 

“You’re meeting with the Neo-Midgar engineers today, Director Tuesti,” she reminded him as she stepped between him and his office door, taking his coffee from his hand firmly. 

“Please call me Reeve,” he asked her again, then protested, “And that’s not until 10:00.” 

He was too surprised to stop her as she set his coffee aside and dragged him to face the morning daylight that filtered through the windows of the office antechamber. 

“You won’t have caught up on sleep by then. Stand still,” she instructed him, and he watched with bemusement as she spilled a collection of cosmetics across her desk - then realized all at once that she intended them for him. 

“Is that really necessary?” he’d been subjected to costume makeup a handful of times in the past while shooting promotional material for Shinra publications, and found it to be an uncomfortable ordeal every time. 

His assistant frowned at him, “While dealing with outside contractors? Absolutely. Now, stand _still_.” 

He hadn’t realized he’d been moving, but endeavoured to stay motionless as she pulled out a fine paintbrush and began doing something uncomfortably wet to the space beneath his eyes where the tired circles had turned into dark bruising over the past weeks. 

“Will this take long?” he asked, trying not to flinch. 

“Less if you don’t move, Director,” she chided him. He couldn’t tell if she was being serious or not, but he chafed to get back to his office, “Your mother called the office last night but you were already out. She said you haven’t been answering at home and wanted you to call her.” 

He did flinch at that. It was almost unheard of for his mother to call him at the office - and always about an emergency. The sick feeling in his stomach that had followed him since awakening twisted a little tighter. 

His concern was joined by the realization that his assistant clearly didn’t realize he had spent the night in the office - that she had left the previous night while he was with Marlene and arrived while he was using the showers. 

From that perspective, he realized, his rumpled suit and sleepless pallor must have looked more incriminating than even he had thought. 

“Do you mind if I make the call from your phone?” he asked her, and she pursed her lips before setting the brush aside briefly to dial a call out and hand him the receiver.

The phone made it through half the second ring before his mother was on the line. 

“Tuesti residence.” 

“Mom, I got the message that -”

“ _Where the hell have you been?_ ”

Reeve glanced at his assistant who was studiously not overhearing anything as she rustled in the bag on her desk. 

“Things have been a little busy here - I’ve had to spend some nights at the office lately working on a project,” and some nights in his car down in the parking garage, although he wasn’t about to admit to those - nights he’d made it that far then couldn’t muster the will to drive home as his head spun sickly from the connection to _somewhere else_. 

“Fine, fine,” he could hear in her tone that it wasn’t, “What about Denzel?”

“... Damn.” 

“Reeve!”

He held the phone from his ear as his mother scolded him, then mouthed “sorry” when his assistant shot him a disapproving look at the movement. 

“It’s been weeks, Reeve!” his mother continued, “the boy is devastated!” 

He sighed and started to pinch the bridge of his nose, then hesitated when his assistant scowled at him, and he held up his hand in an appeasing gesture. 

It was true, he had entirely forgotten to follow up on the boy’s case - one more task lost in the half remembered things that surrounded the Temple of the Ancients - and the guilt hit him hard and sudden. 

“Just a moment,” he held his hand over the receiver to address the woman in front of him, “Ms. Ross, have you seen any correspondence come through here from the Sector 7 relief teams regarding a young man named Denzel? It should have been flagged as urgent.” 

She looked thoughtful for a moment, then shook her head apologetically, “Nothing, Director.” 

“No news,” he related to the phone, and when his mother made an unhappy noise added, “I’ll send a reminder to the relevant people today. We’ll find his family.” 

When he finally handed the receiver back to his receptionist, after a further scolding from his mother, she asked him, “Do you really expect to find anyone else after so long?” 

“Going to find as many as we can,” he answered, and tried not to sound as tired as he felt. 

She nodded somberly, then handed him a small mirror. 

His reflection looked familiar to him in a way that it hadn’t in weeks, possibly longer than that. The help was nice too, unasked for though it was, and he found himself grateful to the woman who had become his assistant - even if she _had_ been assigned to him. 

“Where did you learn to do that?” he asked her, handing back the mirror after ascertaining that he could barely see where the dark bruising had been a few minutes earlier. 

“Your predecessor had certain... proclivities... requiring more discretion than he was able to undertake on his own,” she answered him carefully, beginning to put away the collection of cosmetics that had been spreading across her desk. 

He was learning that his fellow executives had all kinds of proclivities, the longer he worked with them. He hadn’t been aware that his predecessor, in particular, had had anything to be discreet about - but supposed maybe the woman in front of him was just that good. Apparently, saving the company from embarrassment was something she was versed in. 

He thought about asking whether discretion was part of her job description, then held back and said instead, “Well, Ms Ross, my predecessor was very lucky to have you on his team. And so am I.” 

She gave him a real smile then, “Thank you, Director. Should I have flowers sent to your mother's home?” 

“Seems like all I do is make apologies lately-” he cut himself off and shook his head, “Sorry. Yes, please. Thank you.” 

He excused himself to his office to contact the Bone Village project director.

It only occurred to him after he was back in his office to wonder exactly what kind of _proclivities_ she was assuming that _he_ had... but then dismissed the thought. Whatever she thought, it was certainly less damaging than dressing up in a cat suit and hanging around with terrorists.

\---

The morning meeting with the sub-contractors went reassuringly smoothly, for all Reeve bit back his opinion that the chance of the Neo-Midgar project happening at all if someone didn’t find Aeris soon was negligible. 

The afternoon budget meeting between the executives, in contrast to the Neo-Midgar check in, was agonizing (even Rufus looking critically bored on the room’s big screen where he was teleconferencing from Junon) and Reeve soon found his mind wandering against the background drone of Palmer’s dickering with the head of accounting. 

His sense of disquiet from the previous night’s confrontation with Barret weighed heavier on him than he was comfortable with - made him wonder why, in retrospect, he had decided to send Cait Sith on its tottering path across town to find the man in the first place. He could just as easily have reported to Cid and Yuffie in the Tiny Bronco and retreated from the cat in time to get a full night’s sleep - and he had known it just as well at the time as he did looking backward. 

Besides which, it was hard to imagine how any of AVALANCHE could have positively received the revelation of exactly how much the group had fallen back under Shinra’s control... much less their former leader, who had lost so much at the hand of the company. Reeve couldn't deny any more that the disaster in Corel had been no accident - not in the face of all the evidence since he had taken on the role of Cait Sith; the fates of Gongaga and Nibelheim, and of Sector 7... 

But the drive to cross the town and be where Barret was, that wasn’t just about passing information, either - another thing that Reeve wasn’t denying any more. It hadn’t been about his role as Shinra’s agent for a long time. 

As for his role in AVALANCHE... It hadn’t escaped his notice that Barret had, however obliquely, suggested that he could have met them in person the night before. It hadn’t felt like an invitation to step into a trap, either - although he supposed that it might have crossed some minds if he had actually done it. Considered alongside the way that Barret had reached out to Cait Sith without thinking, just after Cloud had awakened, it made Reeve think that maybe the animosity that AVALANCHE (that Barret...) aimed at the cat wasn’t as personal as it was against a convenient target. 

It was a small comfort, but it was something. 

He was startled from his musings when an attendant entered the room with hot drinks from hospitality services, signalling the halfway point of the meeting and making painfully obvious that Palmer had managed to drag his small slot on the agenda into an entire hour’s affair. 

Reeve’s displeasure with Palmer must have been more evident than he had intended, because when the attendant approached to hand him a coffee from the downstairs cafe, the young man’s hand trembled slightly. It reminded him that in spite of his frustrations dealing with his fellow executives, his title still had the power to inspire shock and awe through the rest of the company. 

He forced a smile - which the poor guy seemed barely able to return before making a grateful escape - and his mind was drawn back to AVALANCHE and his interactions with Tifa the previous evening. She was the exact opposite of intimidated by the Shinra executive in her presence, and much as her complete lack of concern for his title and position should have irritated him he couldn’t help finding it charming instead. 

It set him back to wondering what it would have been like, if he had driven out to the port after all, and spoken with them as the Shinra executive rather than as the toy cat... whether the moment would have been accompanied by the strange intensity of his encounter with Barret in Costa del Sol, before he’d been revealed as a Shinra employee - the brief, dizzying impulse before returning to his senses that had tempted him to just _walk away_ from Shinra and everything related to it. 

Fast on the heels of that thought was a twist of mixed excitement and dread, as it occurred to him to worry that Barret would have recognized him from more than just Shinra’s promotional material. Even so the thought of another meeting (whatever the circumstances) reawakened some thread of affection he had been trying to silence, remembering the presence and magnetism Barret projected in person. 

He couldn’t help hoping, by extension, that whatever warm feelings _had_ once grown between them, albeit through the proxy of Cait Sith, combined with the intensity he remembered from Costa del Sol, might in turn lend themselves to...

The sound of a fist slamming hard against the table shook him out of his reverie, and he glanced around to realize how far he had drifted from the budget meeting. 

Palmer, shocked into silence, was staring at Heidegger. 

Heidegger, in turn, was clearly out of patience with the man’s petition for funding. 

Beside Reeve, Hojo used the sudden silence to slide from his chair, announcing, “I have better uses for my time than these endless meetings,” before walking from the room unchallenged with Scarlet following close at his heels a moment later. 

Heidegger looked ready to follow too before turning a suspicious expression on Reeve, who felt a brief moment of panicked exposure. By effort of will he schooled his features and shrugged in response. 

He wasn’t sure how long he had been lost in thought... but was happy to let Heidegger attribute it to Cait Sith. He got to his feet and made his own escape to the sound of Rufus berating Palmer and the head of accounting to work out their differences outside of executive meetings.

Letting his mind wander again as he made his way back to his office, he became certain that - if nothing else - driving to meet AVALANCHE in person would not have ended with him getting hosed off in a utility sink. 

It only occurred to him much later that he had missed the opportunity to consult with Rufus about the instructions to fund an insurgency against the Shinra corporation.

 _We cover our asses here, Reeve,_ Heidegger had explained to him, back when he had first protested the man’s methods. 

Reeve suspected he was doing a piss poor job of it, himself, but... the alternative of _not_ helping AVALANCHE in any way he could - especially watching them stretched thinner day by day the longer Aeris was missing - was becoming unthinkable to him. 

\---

“I’ve made arrangements for all of you to have space to stay at... the dig site,” he finished the sentence carefully, not willing to name Bone Village again. Certainly not after being forced the last time to watch Cid explaining contemporary slang to Vincent through a series of increasingly lewd hand gestures that Reeve would have a great deal of trouble forgetting, “likewise, a shipment of supplies has been sent to the nearest port by fast ship and should precede your arrival by a sufficient margin as not to cause inconvenience.”

The supplies, after Scarlet had (for good or bad) flatly refused to provide any of the weapons or tech that Heidegger had requested, consisted largely of cold weather gear and camping equipment; with AVALANCHE heading to remote northern locations and with winter closing in, it had seemed prudent. He’d also wired gil to their expected arrival point following Heidegger’s approval - but wasn’t prepared to revive the funding argument again so quickly. 

“Nevermind that,” Tifa answered him, “What about Aeris, has anyone seen her?” 

“... Possibly,” Reeve took a deep breath, and Cait Sith squared his shoulders, “there was a report of a young woman spending the night at the dig site but disappeared before morning. They don’t believe that she could have entered the forest, owing to certain local phenomena that would make it extremely improbable, but...” 

“But all kinds of things about Aeris are extremely improbable,” Cloud finished with a sigh. He was up and moving that day, although he was still terribly pale. 

“Precisely,” Cait Sith answered. 

“She went into the forest,” Cloud announced with certainty, “We’re going to have to go after her.” 

Being only a couple of days out from their destination port on the northern continent, Reeve had reservations about whether Cloud would be fit to make _any_ trips more challenging than the stumble he’d taken that morning from their rented room back to the Bronco - but there wasn’t much to be done for it before the time came. 

“Aeris... knows things,” Tifa added, “I’m sure she found her way just fine, wherever she was trying to go. I just wish...”

Red XIII bumped his massive head against her arm when she trailed off, and she turned to him with a soft smile and moved to tangle her fingers in his mane, before giving a small frown, “Those braids are getting tired, Red. Let me redo them?” 

The Cosmo Beast lowered his head and drew away with a small shake that tossed the braids in question around his head and neck. It highlighted how the styling undertaken by Tifa and Aeris in the weeks before had begun to fray over the intervening time. 

“No, thank you,” he cocked his head to one side, “Aeris... Well. I would sooner wait for Aeris to return.” 

“... Me too,” Tifa admitted after a thoughtful pause, and rubbed his head one more time before he got to his feet and walked toward the cockpit, staring silently and fixedly on the blue waters disappearing under the Bronco’s steady progress.


End file.
